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The Internet Is Worse Than a Brainwashing Machine | A rationale is always just a scroll or a click away
A rationale is always just a scroll or a click away.
Think back to the original “fake news” panic, surrounding the 2016 election and its aftermath, when a mixture of partisans and enterprising Macedonian teenagers served up classics such as “FBI Agent, Who Exposed Hillary Clinton’s Cover-up, Found Dead.” Academics and pundits endlessly debated the effect of these articles and whether they might cause “belief change.” Was anyone actually persuaded by these stories such that their worldviews or voting behavior might transform? But the adoption of these conspiracy theories was aided not by the hyperspeed of social media but by the slower distribution of early online streaming sites, message boards, email, and torrenting; there were no centralized feeds for people to create and pull narratives from. Last week, in the hours after a mass murderer ran a car into civilians on Bourbon Street in New Orleans, Trump began tossing out lies and speculation about the suspect, suggesting that he was a migrant (information later arrived indicating that the driver was a U.S. citizen and Army veteran).
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