They reinforced ideological bubbles and filled readers with a righteous sense of 'told-ya-so's, enough that they could overlook the obvious fallacies. There are complex and hidden reasons for the mass embrace of this shite, but the reasons for why people create this bullshit in the first place were depressingly simple – they did it for cash and they did it for a laugh.
There is a certain kind of person who creates fake news stories for bogus sites. Some of them were desperate teenagers in Macedonia who played the US public's anxieties like an electric harp to generate cold, hard currency, but there were also a depressing amount of them who just did it for a laugh. They just wanted to fuck with people.
And the more people who believed their crap, the funnier it got, and the actual, real world, consequences didn't matter at all to these privileged little shits. They weren't the ones who would have to suffer. Their families weren't going to be ripped apart by a cruel, callous and cowardly deportation policy, and are probably young enough that they don't have to worry about health insurance, because they think they're never going to get old and sick.
Needless to say, the vast majority of these shit-gobblers are men who are white as fuck, and while there are assholes in all races, colours and creeds, you only need to look at the genetic make-up of the chinless wonders casually fucking over their fellow man to see that it's those with a greater basic advantage of society who are most willing to kick out the ladder beneath them, because they can afford to laugh about it.
This kind of thinking was also completely ignored in those presidential wrap-ups. There were all sorts of hot takes on how white folks were left disenfranchised, or how poor people turned to an orange gibbon in the vain hope he'd make their lives a bit better. But there wasn't that much talk about the significant asshole demographic, who voted for Trump because they thought he was funny, and all that sexist, homophobic and racist shit he was spouting was worth it, because it riled the squares, man.
People who didn't believe in any ideology just wanted to mess things up for everyone else, and thought it'd be hilarious to have a giant fucking oompa loompa with the nuclear codes.
And they think it's hilarious to fill the internet with fake information, bullshit data and mindbogglingly dumb opinion. Playing games with the objectivity of the media and skewing it to their own idiotic views, because it's fucking funny. They're not bound to any kind of press regulation or rules, and are desperate to bring us all down to their level.
All we can do is not listen to their joke. No polite laughter, no acknowledgement. Don't even give them the satisfaction of revealing how annoying they are, that's what they want.
It can be hard, the fake news looks a lot like the real world stuff, and that gives it credibility. But there is a hunger for real news, always be people who want the real deal. There might be massive audiences in vapid bullcrap that weighs nothing, but that just gives the real work more heft. If you're trying to build a better world, and not just burning down the old one for nihilistic kicks, you're going to need the facts.
-Ron Troupe
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