You’ve been writing fake news for a while now ”” you’re kind of like the OG Facebook news hoaxer. Well, I’d call it hoaxing or fake news. You’d call it parody or satire. How is that scene different now than it was three or five years ago? Why did something like your story about Obama invalidating the election results (almost 250,000 Facebook shares, as of this writing) go so viral?
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.
With all due respect to the “news” scams this writer cites, the tendency to believe viral false stories is by no means confined to the right. By no means. Some degree of self-inspection would benefit the left.
I remember false stories promulgated by the ABC about events in Africa over the impress of authority that were latter totally discredited. So, hairy lefties should make sure of their facts as well. But the general observation that “people are dumber” is an egalitarian statement and applies without prejudice to all, including liberals and progressives et alia, not just the one WaPo would like.