"Gullible the people in the Trump groups"

[Phil1111 1,183]

"UndergroundNewsReport.com was launched Feb. 21. In less than two weeks, more than 1 million people had viewed stories on the site and spread them across social media platforms.

"I was surprised by how gullible the people in the Trump groups were, but as I continued to write ridiculous things they just kept getting shared and I kept drawing more viewers," McDaniel told PolitiFact. "I saw how many fake ridiculous stories were making rounds in these groups and just wanted to see how ridiculous they could get."...

McDaniel said he would sometimes peg his posts to real news events, but more often, he just made them up wholesale. He’d find photos on the Internet and generally rip off an article without even rereading it. In all, he speculated, he worked on the site about two hours per day."

McDaniel even tried to warn viewers by putting a disclaimer on the bottom of his web pages saying his posts "are fiction, and presumably fake news." While a handful of people took the time to email him to ask if stories were real or send hate mail, most of the comments on his links blindly accepted what he wrote as the truth."
http://www.politifact.com/punditfact/article/2017/mar/09/fake-news-website-starts-joke-gains-1-million-view/

[sonnyblu 0]

Big Deal:

Why More Democrats Are Now Embracing Conspiracy Theories
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/15/upshot/why-more-democrats-are-now-embracing-conspiracy-theories.html?_r=0

The Rise of Progressive 'Fake News'
https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2017/02/viva-la-resistance-content/515532/


"Even as Democrats decry the false claims streaming regularly from the White House, they appear to have become more vulnerable to unsupported claims and conspiracy theories that flatter their own political prejudices.

"since the election, there has been a noticeable increase in the flow of dubious and unsupported claims among liberals."

"Brooke Binkowski, managing editor at the rumor-tracking site Snopes, recently told The Atlantic that she has been seeing more false reports aimed at liberals or from liberal sources — “a lot of dubious news, a lot of wishful-thinking-type stuff.”

"In total, the percentage of Democrats who agreed on average with the conspiracy claims in the scale increased from 27 percent before the election to 32 percent afterward. By contrast, Republicans’ willingness to endorse conspiratorial claims declined after the election over all...from 28 percent to 19 percent."

"A simple explanation for this shift is that misperceptions often focus on the president and are most commonly held by members of the other party."

"In other words, losing the presidential election made Democrats more likely to blame secret conspiracies for the state of the world, while making Republicans less willing to indulge these sorts of claims."