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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: 2) by istartedi on Thursday November 24 2016, @08:39PM
Isn't this just a modern update of tabloids? You know, the dead tree things that used to be our primary source of "fake news" back in the day? They still sell at most supermarket checkout lines. They were mostly celebrity oriented, but I'm sure they did political things too since politicians are just a particular type of celebrity. One of them in particular, World News, actually embraced their falseness and went so far over the top that it was absurd. My favorite was "FARMER SHOOTS 10 LB. GRASSHOPPER", which was accompanied by the analog version of a "photoshop" actually showing a guy holding the thing up like a fish. I couldn't restrain myself from laughing right there in the store.
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