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Pit Bulls, Our Best Friends!

Pit Bulls, are Our Best Friends, but again I ask, “Are We Theirs? Pit bulls are among the sweetest…

Fake News Problem on Social Media

Since the advent of the last election in the United States (c. May 2015), the increase of false or fake news has grown astronomically. I am not blaming the election, however. This event might have catalyzed an already brewing reaction on social media. You know what I mean. You see the articles every day that friends and family share, where you just scratch your head and wonder how they could be so daft as to believer that bit of tripe. It’s been happening for longer than a year and we’ve prepared memes to face it that are years old already.

During the elections, spreadsheets were created to keep supporters on the right trajectory, because fake news was being used to dissipate support or at least confuse it enough to make in ineffectual. It largely had the opposite affect until about the end of June, when it was clear that no matter what people were saying in polls or online, Sanders wasn’t going to take the primary. Supporters began blaming Sanders and declaring him a fraud. There were also those quite certain that fraud was committed (I’m still of this mind, just to be clear). It’s really easy to blame voter suppression and voter fraud, because that is the obvious answer. But, what if the groups were so inundated with liars, that we had no real grasp of where the movement actually was in numbers? And, thus, the effort to confuse and dissipate had won? That became evident in the months after the primary closed. Devout supporters turned into rabid dogs who couldn’t wait to deride a man without a mark against him up until that point.

Yet, those same folks have moved from frothing with rage and disappointment to sharing that fake news they had been warned against for months prior. Go into Jill Stein Groups on Facebook and you’ll see this. It’s one of the reasons I found it difficult to throw my support behind the Green candidate. Granted, this group is full of the same people that feel that immunizations are causing autism, a thoroughly debunked fake study from years ago. The man who dared to put out this fake news has been fined, put in jail and his study thrown out. There is no scientific evidence existing that supports the fake study. Yet, the opinion persists. It was one of the cornerstones of demeaning Stein supporters by both right wing and left wing voters.

Why do such things persist despite tons of evidence that debunk and disprove them?