It can't be overstated that tens of millions exist within an alternate reality.
They're comfortable there and aren't going to leave. They have to be outnumbered at the ballot box. Remember, Trump himself said he could shoot someone in the middle of a crowded street and not lose a voter. I get that the mainstream media as a whole (the ratings-focused obsession with spectacle and the promotion of false equivalencies due to some twisted sense of what constitutes "balance"
is a bigger problem than fake news, and that those drawn to fake news (which is decidedly pro-Republican/anti-Democrat) were already determined to vote for Trump, but it is nonetheless disturbing and problematic that tens of millions of people believe utter nonsense. Society must find a way to address this problem by focusing on youth who can still be saved, so to speak.
I listened to an interview with Craig Silverman, who studies media inaccuracy. You can listen to the 36-minute interview or read the transcript here: How False Stories Spread And Why People Believe Them.
It's depressing but not too surprising, except perhaps for just how much fake news is out there. The bottom line is that the likes of those who support Trump are, as one might expect, drawn to utter falsehoods like flies are drawn to manure. And presenting them with facts, such as by pointing them in the direction of a debunking site like Snopes, seems to have no effect. Those who believe and spread the sort of content that is debunked by Snopes (or by logical reasoning) will do so over and over and over again, regardless of how many times you make them aware of how false the information is (a member of my family is a prime example, sadly).
From an article during the campaign:
Because the likes of Conway know full well that Trump supporters don't seem to give a rip if something is actually true. Trump and other Republicans have a cult-like following.
It's probably too simplistic to say they're all gullible or uneducated, though that's certainly a factor. It's that they've created an alternate reality and refuse to leave that comfortable space. Without that space, their ideology withers in the light of truth, and somewhere deep down a portion of them probably realize that. They can't acknowledge being bigots, so they must cling to other reasons -- any reason -- why they support who they support.
So, an unqualified, Putin-backed, supremely bigoted, sexual predator 'reality' TV celebrity is now the president-elect. His supporters don't care that Trump is nominating people to head up the very departments that they despise or an AG who is opposed to civil rights. In fact, they celebrate that. This will have devastating consequences (for education, the natural environment, civil rights, the US's international standing, health care, etc.).
Anyway, some excerpts from the Silverman interview:
And so at the end of the day, in that critical moment, the fake news of those top 20 stories was getting more engagement on Facebook than some of the stories from the biggest media outlets in the U.S. And that was incredibly surprising. I didn't actually expect fake news to win out in that sense.
And if they sign up, for example, for Google AdSense, an ad program, they can get money as people visit their sites and it's pretty straightforward. So they tried election sites, and over time they all came to realize that the stuff that did the best was pro-Trump stuff. They got the most traffic and most traction.
So one, when people create the false stuff and if they're smart about it - if I put it that way - you know, they know that it needs to appeal to emotion. They know that maybe if it can have a sense of urgency, if it can be tied to things people care about, that's probably going to do well in terms of fake stuff. Whereas when you come in as the debunker, what you're doing is actively going against information that people are probably already, you know, willing to believe and that gets them emotionally. And to tell somebody I'm sorry that thing you saw and shared is not true is you coming in in a very negative way unfortunately. And so the reaction is often for people to get defensive and to disagree with you. And just in general you just seem like kind of a spoil sport. You're ruining the fun or you're getting in the way of their beliefs. And a lot of times when I put debunkings out there, you know, some of the reactions I get are people saying, well, it might as well be true. You know, he could have said that or that could have happened. Or, of course, you get accusations that, you know, you're biased. And so the debunkings just don't appeal as much to us on a psychological level.
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What can they be thinking?
