Facebook fake-news writer: ‘I think Donald Trump won because of me’ | Hacker News Reader

Facebook fake-news writer: ‘I think Donald Trump won because of me’

washingtonpost.com

37 pointschang230110 comments

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

> 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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