2016 Presidential Election

[fansince'76]

Donald Trump Protester Speaks Out: “I Was Paid $3,500 To Protest Trump’s Rally”

Pathetic, but not the least bit surprising...

[AtlantaDan]

Pathetic, but not the least bit surprising...

Also not the least bit true - Mr. Horner was interviewed by The Washington Post

Paul Horner, the 38-year-old impresario of a Facebook fake-news empire, has made his living off viral news hoaxes for several years. ...

You’ve been writing fake news for a while now — you’re kind of like the OG Facebook news hoaxer. Well, I’d call it hoaxing or fake news. You’d call it parody or satire. How is that scene different now than it was three or five years ago? Why did something like your story about Obama invalidating the election results (almost 250,000 Facebook shares, as of this writing) go so viral?
Honestly, people are definitely dumber. They just keep passing stuff around. Nobody fact-checks anything anymore — I mean, that’s how Trump got elected. He just said whatever he wanted, and people believed everything, and when the things he said turned out not to be true, people didn’t care because they’d already accepted it. It’s real scary. I’ve never seen anything like it.

You mentioned Trump, and you’ve probably heard the argument, or the concern, that fake news somehow helped him get elected. What do you make of that?

My sites were picked up by Trump supporters all the time. I think Trump is in the White House because of me. His 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.




Why? I mean — why would you even write that?

Just ’cause his supporters were under the belief that people were getting paid to protest at their rallies, and that’s just insane. I’ve gone to Trump protests — trust me, no one needs to get paid to protest Trump. I just wanted to make fun of that insane belief, but it took off. They actually believed it.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/...mepage%2Fstory

[fansince'76]

Also not the least bit true

I missed the ".co" (for comedy, I presume) at the end of the abcnews.com link.

[AtlantaDan]

I missed the ".co" (for comedy, I presume) at the end of the abcnews.com link.

These online scams (e.g. - the email requests I get to "update" my credit card account) are very well done these days

I had to check my Washington Post link through a separate search to make sure I was not posting a fake WaPo story discrediting the fake protesters paid story