Plus this particular boy wonder very confidently stood up in front of everyone and said fake news is BS right after the elections.
I wonder how he was convinced.
EDIT:
> Mark Zuckerberg has rejected the notion that fake news on Facebook influenced the outcome of the US election, describing it as a “pretty crazy idea”.
> “Voters make decisions based on their lived experience,” he said at the Techonomy conference near San Francisco on Thursday.
> “There is a profound lack of empathy in asserting that the only reason someone could have voted the way they did is because they saw fake news,” he said, and anyone who believes that has “failed to internalize” the message supporters of Donald Trump sent during the election.
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/nov/10/facebook-...
He didn't say fake news doesn't exist; he said it did not determine the American president.
It's even more specific: Fake news might have had an actual effect on the election, but blaming the election result on fake news fundamentally amounts to not accepting responsibility for your own side's failures.
If (as an extreme hypothetical) one side used lies and laundered foreign money to win the election, and the other side didn't do that and lost, then the losing side doesn't need to "accept responsibility for their own failures", they need justice.
We don't yet know the full story of what actually happened in the last American presidential campaign, though, so this is moot for now.
Unfortunately I don't know what "justice" would look like in such a situation, but perhaps re-running the process without the unethical and criminal elements would be a good first order approximation.
They both did. But one side is accused of taking money from scary Russia, while the other took money from fluffy bunnies Ireland, England, France, and other allies.
The "us versus them" narrative is easier to work with than the "us versus other people who are allied with us but also not supposed to do these things."
Plus, America has loved underdogs since the days when baseball was interesting. Since H lost, it's usual to attack T. If H won instead of T, then it would be the other way around. It's just how America works.
Isn't this a matter of opinion rather than of fact?
Education helps, to a certain extent. But treating fake news as some sort of a new threat seems strange.
People are very susceptible to believing false information stated eloquently, and this as you say has always been true, but in days past the spread of such information was limited to very disreputable channels and were quite easily countered with that fact alone. "Where did you get that from? Oh, <publication> is full of shit, everyone knows that Joey".
Now it takes ten minutes for a Facebook post to be heard 'round the world and people believe it implicitly. Spreading fake news has never been easier, and countering it has never been harder.
but nobody doubted that the yellow press existed, and that's the important difference. People knew that they were reading tabloid bs when they opened a paper like this, the authoritative function of trusted news outlets wasn't undermined.
Social media disguises itself as authentic. People who influence on social media can do so by pretending to be your neighbour who shares real-life experiences rather than the 'distanced elites'. Regardless of whether they are saying the truth or not.
That's the difference and it has had a much bigger impact on undermining a shared consensus about what is fiction and what is real than the historical yellow press.
I do hope it's a self-correcting process.
It also goes without saying that, had Clinton won, this conversation wouldn't even exist, despite the wild amounts of false information about both sides, and the results, that is said about the election to this day.
As an exercise, write down everything you believe about the demographics that voted for both Trump and Clinton, then compare that to the polling done by CNN.