Friday, November 18, 2016

Post-Truth: Facebook fake news creator claims he put Trump in White House


Paul Horner — the 38-year-old self-made titan of a fake news empire on Facebook — is claiming responsibility for pushing Donald Trump to the White House, and says he has no plans to stop publishing fake news.

In an interview with The Washington Post, Horner attributed his success to Trumps’ particular base of supporters. He is the man behind such viral headlines as “The Amish in America Commit their Vote to Donald Trump” and “President Obama Signs Executive Order Banning the National Anthem at all Sporting Events Nationwide” — neither of which were true.

“My sites were picked up by Trump supporters all the time. I think Trump is in the White House because of me. His followers don’t fact-check anything — they’ll post everything, believe anything. His campaign manager posted my story about a protester getting paid $3,500 as fact. Like, I made that up. I posted a fake ad on Craigslist,” he told The Washington Post.

Horner’s fake news articles — published on sites designed to mimic the look and feel of well-known, legitimate news outlets — had enormous impact this election cycle. Even members of Donald Trump’s inner circle, including Trump’s son Eric and then-campaign manager Corey Lewandowski, shared links to Horner’s content. Horner’s stories also made their way to Google News, known to feature stories from reputable news sources.

“Honestly, people are definitely dumber,” Horner told The Post to explain the popularity of his content, which he suggested he sees as satire akin to The Onion. “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.”

He said he didn’t do it for ideological reasons. “I hate Trump,” he told The Post. “I thought I was messing with the campaign, maybe I wasn’t messing them up as much as I wanted — but I never thought he’d actually get elected.”

In a new analysis of the last three months of campaign coverage, BuzzFeed News concluded that top fake election news stories generated more engagement on Facebook than top election stories from 19 major news outlets combined, including the New York Times, Fox News and CBS News

According to BuzzFeed, among the top 20 fake election-related articles on Facebook, most had a political bent that favored the Trump campaign; all but three were anti-Clinton or pro-Trump. Facebook users engaged with them more than 8.7 million times.

No comments :

Post a Comment

ANONYMOUS COMMENTS WILL NOT BE POSTED!
please use either your real name or a pseudonym.