
Facebook fake-news writer: ‘I think Donald Trump won because of me’ - chang2301
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-intersect/wp/2016/11/17/facebook-fake-news-writer-i-think-donald-trump-is-in-the-white-house-because-of-me/
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lujim
From the article... Nice

"I think Donald Trump is in the White House because of me".

I'm skeptical... then this

"Speaking of Clinton — did you target fake news at her supporters? Or Gary
Johnson’s, for that matter? (Horner’s Facebook picture shows him at a rally
for Johnson.)"

"No. I hate Trump."

To be fair the next question somewhat addresses this with some anecdotal info.
However at this point I can't take the authors credibility seriously. He
sounds like a troll with way too much time on his hands.

"Is that it? You posted on Facebook a couple weeks ago that you had a lot of
ideas for satirizing Clinton and other figures, but that “no joke . . . in
doing this for six years, the people who clicked ads the most, like it’s the
cure for cancer, is right-wing Republicans.” That makes it sound like you’ve
found targeting conservatives is more profitable."

"Yeah, it is. They don’t fact-check."

I think it's fair to say that older people tend to be both a) more
conservative on average than younger voters b) more susceptible to click bait
and fake news. ie "Forwards from Grandma"

This guy could do so much more with his life.

~~~
jsight
That is basically how I read this article as well. It looks like a fake news
author has trolled the Washington Post here.

Most of the fake news that I've seen Democrats post have been a lot like this.
Interviews with fake news authors (that are trolling) and posts with fake
quotes from Trump are fairly common.

The Republican fake news seemed to be obsessed with the idea that Hillary
would be convicted of something.

------
hash-set
That article reads a bit fake--there's pretty good evidence that people did
indeed get paid to cause trouble at Trump rallies.

I'm more than a little bit concerned about the whole "We must stop fake news"
bs--news has always been made up. Read about "Yellow Journalism" and how the
US got into the Spanish-American war!

The answer to this kind of speech is more speech. If people want to make shit
up and put it on the Internet that's fine. It's been happening since day 1
anyways. Did we not just witness the likes of NY Times, Washington Post, CNN,
Fox, NBC, basically all US media pretend Hillary Clinton was in the lead of
the election and had a 98% chance of winning? Fake news, indeed.

~~~
justinlaster
There was no pretending? Why do you say that? What they were referencing was
based on actual polls. There are plenty of ways those polls can go wrong, or
how the winds can shift between polls, and tons of other variables. They do
this every single election. Seek Karl Rove's meltdown when Obama won. People
seem to be really confused about statistics this election and it's kind of
concerning.

>there's pretty good evidence that people did indeed get paid to cause trouble
at Trump rallies.

No there isn't, or at least I haven't seen any. What I have seen is the
weakest of links between individuals who happen to share the same name. In any
city there's bound to be individuals who have the exact same name as you,
especially when you come from the same background.

That's not evidence. That's coincidence.

------
justinlaster
I'll ask this again, in regards to claims about Facebook "censoring"
conservative outlets: If the same publishing organizations continue to post
fake news, and Facebook editors keep having to remove those stories from the
same publishers: is it really bias at that point?

If conservative outlets are more apt to publish fake news stories than their
liberal counterparts, or perhaps liberal publications that post fake news
stories ended up trending less often, that still seems like a problem
conservatives should want to address. It doesn't like a Facebook or any other
medium is really suited to address.

When facebook removed the editorial curators, tons and tons of fake news
stories started trending. I personally witnessed this rather unfortunate turn
of events on my facebook feed. I saw friends and family share completely bogus
articles about "The Wikileaks", emails, general corruption, pay outs from
foreign leaders, etc. You name it, there was probably a fake story about it.
At one point, there was a story about how Trump's victory caused Ford to
resume their F-150 model production in Ohio, instead of mexico. Apparently,
people believed that those kind of things could just turn around in less than
a week. I suspect that many people knew how ridiculous such a claim is, but
they didn't care. It fit the narrative.

My personal experience and something that is echoed in the article, is that
the conservative population is far more likely to rabidly flock to any story
that fits some perspective that's beneficial to the narrative as a whole. I
witnessed one liberal story being circulated that was definitely false, but it
was quickly called out and shut down by other left-leaning people. Where as,
I've noticed the opposite effect on fake conservative news stories. Those
stories are usually meet with reinforcement, regardless of how fake and
contrived the story is.

>"His (Trump) 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."

This indeed did happen. When it was publicly called out (I think it took
something like a day), they simply removed the post. There was no apology,
there was no correction. It was just removed. But at that point, the damage is
done. I'm sure that story stuck with quite a few people.

------
guard-of-terra
> Nobody fact-checks anything anymore — I mean, that’s how Trump got elected

No it's not. You faking news and then making fun of it is how Trump got
elected. Everybody is kinda tired with how smart you are, in a dumb way.

Disclaimer: I'm not from the USA.

------
woliveirajr
Well, I think this just got news because Trump was/is news during all the
campaign.

From the article you can find that many of his fake-news went viral in the
past, and probably will keep going in the future. Probably in a more deep
research you'll find that many other "mediable" people (or their staff) picked
fake news once in a while. Now, it's just interesting to talk about Trump, no
matter if you were in favor, against or even is tired of hearing about him.

~~~
1337biz
It is sad but a little entertaining how hard media pushes the 'Trump voters
got conned' narrative. Almost like angry, little kids who are in incapable of
accepting that somebody dares to have a different opinion.

~~~
ern
The media was covering fake news well before the election.

I suspect that, had Hillary won, we'd have seen the same amount of coverage,
but with a tone of "it was a close call".

It has been clear for a long time that large-scale trolling and fake news
operations were underway for a long time, and needed to be addressed.

Indeed, I expect that the MSM is being somewhat restrained here, because they
don't want to seem like sore losers.

~~~
1337biz
I disagree on that because I actually looked into what they classified awhs
fake news. In the recent buzzfeed article they classify hyper partisan news as
fake news. I actually looked into the raw files. And there was if cause
Breitbart listed amongst the fake news. So in the end it is established media
trying to claim their ground.

