This Is What It's Like to Read Fake News For Two Weeks

[highplainsdem]

From Politico's Simon van Zuylen-Wood, and subtitled "I lived Michael Flynn Jr.'s media diet so you wouldn’t have to":

http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2017/01/this-is-what-its-like-to-read-fake-news-for-two-weeks-214591

So I became @HighCastlePhil. I decided I’d take Flynn Jr.’s tailored feed (944 accounts; a couple of dozen users with private accounts declined my request) and wear it myself for a while. I picked my Twitter handle in honor of Philip K. Dick, who wrote the ultimate alt-reality novel “The Man in the High Castle,” about a world in which the Nazis won the war. I didn’t tweet but watched and tried to imagine what was going through the mind of the man who sees the world through faux-tinted glasses. I noted that when Flynn Jr. opened his account several years ago, he evinced a conventionally conservative outlook, following Rush Limbaugh and the Heritage Foundation. He enjoyed the sports talk personality Colin Cowherd and wasn’t above checking out what @WhiteHouse had to say. Over time, though, he began collecting users who associated themselves almost exclusively with Donald Trump, alt-right white nationalism, or both. Many of them had similar handles: “Deplorable Aaron,” “Deplorable Vet,” “Johnny Deplorable.” As a diagnostic system it wasn’t perfect; I couldn’t replicate a dummy Facebook account, where the most mendacious garbage tends to mushroom. Still, Flynn Jr. used the medium regularly, and followed enough people to yield a good sample size for my experiment.

I began lingering on Phil Dick’s Twitter feed and kept at it over the course of a couple weeks. At the same time I scaled back on the information I gathered from mainstream outlets or my own social media feeds. If there is such a thing as a parallel information universe I had at least one foot planted firmly in it. One thing I learned is that a lot of people have low tolerance for serious articles published in respectable publications. So I thought it best to present my findings in the form of a clickbait listicle. Without further ado, the five craziest things you’ll learn when all you read is fake news.

Pizzagate Isn’t Dead

The John Podesta-is-running-a-child-sex-trafficking-organization-out-of-a pizzeria conspiracy theory ricocheted from 4chan to reddit to fake news sites then back to social media throughout October and November. But only after real bullets were fired at the pizzeria on December 4 did mainstream news outlets begin thoroughly debunking the story. Michael Flynn Jr. wasn’t having it. “Until #Pizzagate proven to be false, it'll remain a story. The left seems to forget #PodestaEmails and the many 'coincidences' tied to it,” he tweeted. Within a few days, Flynn Jr. was formally relieved of his duties on the Trump transition, and most of us in the pro journalism orbit moved on. But in the world of bizarro news, tens of thousands of pizzagate truthers were just warming up, convinced that our lack of interest was proof of a cover-up.

-snip-

Indeed, my feed was totally saturated with Pro-Kremlin sentiment. Part of that seemed connected to the likely Russian hack of emails that weakened the Clinton campaign and were published on Wikileaks, an organization that seems to have the trust of the alt-right. Anti-ISIS sentiment was baked in, and many Tweeters were just parroting the nation’s most prominent Russophile, Donald J. Trump. In any event, Russian propaganda intersected with Trumpian propaganda to such an extent that I observed little skepticism of Putin or RT, his English-language mouthpiece. At one point user @neverRINOs retweeted an image of Bashar Al-Assad on RT, saying, “Western media has no credibility, morality.” Above it, he wrote, “FACT CHECK: TRUE.” As Cernovich tweeted, “Putin is a larger than life alpha male who loves his country and will fight to defend it. Why don’t you admire him? Brainwashing.”

-snip-

For the most part, the folks in Phil Dick’s twitter feed are not that interested in policy. While much of the “corporate media” was scrutinizing Donald Trump’s cartoonishly rich and well-connected cabinet appointees, Johnny Deplorable and the rest were posting racist memes about Michelle Obama. (And this was before Trump ally Carl Paladino posited that she should move to Africa and live with a gorilla.) Mainstream commentators suggested Trump’s working-class supporters would eventually feel betrayed by their candidate’s sudden lurch towards plutocracy. But judging by my sample size, the news from the #swamp wasn’t even coming across their computer screens.

-snip-

After a week, I’d seen enough, and stepped out of the echo chamber. Overall, I found plenty of evidence that, yeah, fake news is a poisonous influence on the supporters of Donald Trump. But I’m not sure all that much would change if the teenagers in Skopje knocked it off and shut down their bogus sites. Social media will continue to facilitate the distribution of odious memes and the bullying of dissenters. @HighCastlePhil & co. will scrutinize and pass along information that they think might yield a politically useful smoking gun, and ignore information that doesn’t. In that regard they’re no different from other partisans. But there is a distinction between wearing political blinders, as we all do, and actively embracing ludicrous untruths manufactured for the purpose of making money. The tragic irony of the new credulousness is that it badly exacerbates the tribalism and distrust that turned so many fake news adherents against “establishment” politicians and journalists in the first place.

Again, this is what was picked up following the same Twitter sources Michael Flynn Jr. followed and sometimes retweeted, with his father sometimes doing the same. (And it matches what I've observed just searching for news about "trump" on Twitter, where a lot of this garbage from Cernovich and other deplorables turns up mixed in with credible news and commentary.) This is the cesspool of fake online news and bigotry, a real swamp Trump has no intention of draining because he owes his electoral college victory to it.

Trump has talked at times about "opening up" libel laws so public persons, including politicians, can sue the media. Don't know whether it's ever occurred to him that if that does ever happen, the entire alt-right media swamp could be put out of business.

[Generator]

1. Fucking Mike Cernovich

The neo-Nazi "alt right" white supremes love dictators. They love Trump. Oh they love Putin-because they believe Russia is the perfect example of a white man's paradise. They are defending against the evil brown hordes and Muslims. They would sell their soul for enslavement. It works if you are a a white man. Women and Gays and anybody else doesn't do so well in Russia. His Dream for America. These are Bannon dreams as well. It's all connected. I wish people paid attention. I had to because I had a family member that went down this sick road. I know how they think. I know the danger we are in.

[riversedge]

2. I have seen this last fake news he discusses creep into my twitter account

lots of times (deplorable handles also). I generally just block them--but more appear!



Hillary Clinton Murdered (At Least) Five People in 2016

At that point in the recent political news cycle when the media was most focused on Russian involvement in the John Podesta and Democratic National Committee email hacks, two responses tended to pop up in my feed. The first was to post memes and jokes blaming everything on the Russians. The second was to raise questions about an alleged scandal far graver than a little email hack.

“If liberals were really so interested in the truth, they’d investigate the unsolved murder of Seth Rich,” @HuxleyHill wrote on the morning of December 14. Rich was the young DNC staffer who was shot and killed in Washington, D.C. this summer after an apparent mugging attempt. I took @HuxleyHill’s advice and began poking around. Soon I discovered a pervasive theory that Rich was the source of the DNC leaks and was gunned down by Clinton’s lackeys in retribution.

Once again, Aaron and Melissa of TruthStreamMedia.com had a video for me: “Clinton Body Count +5 in Just 6 Weeks.” “[Julian] Assange has hinted strongly that it could have been a DNC staffer who leaked the WikiLeaks stuff,” intoned Aaron. “It’s possible that was Seth Rich.” (Both used to be affiliated with InfoWars, the platform of infamous conspiracy theorist Alex Jones.) They went on to tick off several more ‘mysterious’ deaths. And their list didn’t even include former Clinton Foundation CEO Eric Braverman, who has been reported “missing” by bogus news stalwarts such as wwww.pmnightlynews.com and www.morningnewsusa.com. “They’re dropping dead,” Aaron said. As of this writing, the video has over 1.1 million views.

Sometimes Real News Is Stranger than Fake News

For the most part, the folks in Phil Dick’s twitter feed are not that interested in policy. While much of the “corporate media” was scrutinizing Donald Trump’s cartoonishly rich and well-connected cabinet appointees, Johnny Deplorable and the rest were posting racist memes about Michelle Obama. (And this was before Trump ally Carl Paladino posited that she should move to Africa and live with a gorilla.) Mainstream commentators suggested Trump’s working-class supporters would eventually feel betrayed by their candidate’s sudden lurch towards plutocracy. But judging by my sample size, the news from the #swamp wasn’t even coming across their computer screens.

All that said, real news did occasionally find its way into the feed. But it lived or died based on its partisan potential. Two non-invented stories in particular were shared widely. First came a Detroit News report that more ballots had been counted in some parts of the city than there were voters. (Only 782 of them, though, the Detroit Free Press later reported. Hardly enough to sway the election.) Second, more recently, was the news that a professor at Drexel University had sent out a possibly satirical tweet that seemed to endorse “white genocide.” Yet reports of Russian interference in the presidential election were denied or mocked as irrelevant. When former Illinois Republican Congressman Joe Walsh sent a tweet expressing concern over the hacks, one of the users I follow suggested he “shut the hell up, you insufferable moron.”

After a week, I’d seen enough, and stepped out of the echo chamber. .............................

[spanone]

3. K&R...

[riverwalker]

4. I know what you mean

I have my Liberal &Democratic people I follow, but every once in a while search hashtags "tcot" or "MAGA" to see what's up and it's like an alternate universe. It's astonishing.