Fake News and Propaganda
There are lots of claims that circulation of fake news tilted the scales in favour of Trump. How exactly, you wonder: 1) Most people don’t bother reading/watching any news; and their sole source of news is whatever their Facebook feed shows them. 2) Facebook didn’t (couldn’t?) filter out the fake news; and (as always) just kept pumping whatever users tended to click on. 3) Thus the fake news barrage hit those who were inclined to believe in it; and the volume eventually convinced them it must be true. Nick Carr points out that how quickly things have changed: “Once upon a time — not so long ago, really — there was something called the mainstream media, and it employed lots of journalists and editors and fact-checkers to filter the news. We came to resent these “gatekeepers,” as we took to calling them, because they restricted what we read and saw. They were self-interested elites who… im...