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The Washington Post published an interview [...] with Paul Horner, who has made his living off of writing viral news hoaxes on sites like Facebook for the past several years. "But in recent months, Horner has found the fake-news ecosystem growing more crowded, more political and vastly more influential: In March, Donald Trump's son Eric and his then-campaign manager, Corey Lewandowski, even tweeted links to one of Horner's faux-articles. His stories have also appeared as news on Google."
Although Horner compares himself to parody and satire sites like The Onion (though less obvious), he's now concerned about the influence of fake news. A few excerpts from the interview:
On why he has seen greater popularity recently:
Honestly, people are definitely dumber. They just keep passing stuff around. Nobody fact-checks anything anymore — I mean, that's how Trump got elected. He just said whatever he wanted, and people believed everything, and when the things he said turned out not to be true, people didn't care because they'd already accepted it. It's real scary. I've never seen anything like it.
How he thinks people should treat his fake news:
I thought they'd fact-check it, and it'd make them look worse. I mean that's how this always works: Someone posts something I write, then they find out it's false, then they look like idiots. [... But] they just keep running with it! They never fact-check anything!
On the recent push by Facebook and Google to target fake news sites:
Yeah, I mean — a lot of the sites people are talking about, they're just total BS sites. There's no creativity or purpose behind them. I'm glad they're getting rid of them. I don't like getting lumped in with Huzlers. I like getting lumped in with the Onion. The stuff I do — I spend more time on it. There's purpose and meaning behind it. I don't just write fake news just to write it.
[...] I'm glad they're getting rid of those sites. I just hope they don't get rid of mine, too.
Related reporting from Alternet.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday November 24 2016, @07:52PM
> So who gets to decide what "false news" is?
Obviously the people who write it. This guy deliberately set out to write fake news.
> Honestly? I think "fake news" is a sign the system is working fine.
No, its a sign that the internet is really good at tearing down corrupt institutions but utterly shite at creating new institutions to replace them. For all the bitching about the corrupt media, they had standards. They failed to meet those standards often enough, but 9 times out of 10 they did a good job. They fact-checked, they verified with multiple sources, they passed on stories that couldn't meet those standards and when they screwed up, they were accountable. They printed retractions, they had mechanisms for public self-criticism through an ombudsman, they even fired people who were just too egregious. Even when those people had long distinguished careers (e.g. Dan Rather, Brian Williams).
We are on the way to replacing all of that invisible infrastructure of integrity with ... nothing. Why? Because the human endeavor of journalistic integrity was imperfect. We've turned hysteria over imperfection into an indictment of complete failure. We have made the perfect the enemy of the good and as a result thrown the baby out with the bathwater.