We Tracked Down A Fake-News Creator In The Suburbs. Here's What We Learned (NPR)
http://www.npr.org/sections/alltechconsidered … he-suburbs
one of my favorite parts:
He was amazed at how quickly fake news could spread and how easily people believe it. He wrote one fake story for NationalReport.net about how customers in Colorado marijuana shops were using food stamps to buy pot.
"What that turned into was a state representative in the House in Colorado proposing actual legislation to prevent people from using their food stamps to buy marijuana based on something that had just never happened," Coler says.
During the run-up to the presidential election, fake news really took off. "It was just anybody with a blog can get on there and find a big, huge Facebook group of kind of rabid Trump supporters just waiting to eat up this red meat that they're about to get served," Coler says. "It caused an explosion in the number of sites. I mean, my gosh, the number of just fake accounts on Facebook exploded during the Trump election."
Coler says his writers have tried to write fake news for liberals — but they just never take the bait.
i love how it doesn't work on liberals...
I think that's a dangerous assumption. Everyone can be fooled, no matter how smart you are. Plus there are lots of cognitive biases we all have. You always need to be on the lookout for this.
Also remember Jill Stein believes all sorts of crazy shit (vaccine denial, anti-GMO, etc._. She and her beliefs are not exactly mainstream right now, but it's not hard to see that they *could* become mainstream in a few decades...
Also somewhat related: http://www.vox.com/2016/4/21/11451378/smug-am … liberalism
That being said, it is true that in some conservative circles they seem to lap up every fucking conspiracy theory that has ever been invented. It is, quite frankly, just pathetic.
when he said "never," it was probably an exaggeration. and i was just going with that.
i just like the reaffirmation that liberals are generally intelligent, while right-wing fanatics...
I've also had this feeling for a long time, but I'm not sure if it's actually *true*. It's a tricky one because right-wing folks think the left-wing folks are stupid, and vice versa. How can I be sure I'm actually right?
That being said, in general there does seem to be a lot more pompous arrogance in right-wing circles which I find increasingly annoying. For example, a certain member of this forum has repeatedly compared me to Stalin and other unsavoury communist regimes whenever I asserted anything that looked vaguely like a left-wing position (on IRC, not here).
In general, it seems to be that too much of right-wing politics doesn't even recognize the legitimacy of left-wing politics any more. This is probably one reason why people are complaining so frequently about "biased media" like the NYT or CNN or anything really that's slightly critical of Trump.
I guess that, in the end, Bertrand Russell was right when he wrote that "the fundamental cause of the trouble is that in the modern world the stupid are cocksure while the intelligent are full of doubt". As mentioned, you also have these people on the left side of the political spectrum (they gravitate towards e.g. PETA and such), but it certainly seems to be a bigger issue on the right side of the spectrum at the moment.