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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 dry on Friday November 25 2016, @02:00AM
1st amendment only stops Congress from passing laws limiting speech.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday November 25 2016, @05:59AM
And what law enables the president to restrict speech?
Because I don't see it in the constituation and if congress hasn't passed such a law giving presidents that ability, then they do not have it.
(Score: 2) by Yog-Yogguth on Tuesday November 29 2016, @12:22AM
In case you're sincere the US government all the way from the POTUS up at the top and on down to some cops have openly not followed the US constitution for quite a while, not even in general, just as an example what do you think NSLs (National Security Letters) are for except to stop people from talking? They've defined "legal" as whatever they do.
Plenty of people ought to pay closer attention to what Wikileaks has been releasing and what real news sites have been reporting, most of the people who did voted for Trump and bless them for it because it was the only way to avoid another Clinton and now Jill Stein has pulled a Sanders much like Johnson did, the people who didn't read Wikileaks and the Podesta and DNC files only come across as paid astroturfers and/or completely uninformed.
But at least the fake Soros-funded "protests" pretty much stopped once the paid participants became aware of armed citizens keeping an eye on them, suddenly $35 an hour wasn't such good pay any longer and the middlemen had to cool it while hoping they could find a different batch of uninformed suckers to bus in for any later attempts.
That's great, nothing is better than avoiding both WWIII and also a civil war, so far so good and let's hope that remains the end result. Then one can start getting back to the actual law and building the US society back up into what it was meant to be → MAGA.
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