A single fabricated news story fabricated at a kitchen table reached six million readers
Evidence
Two months after the “sausage factory” article, the New York Times ran another bombshell about anti-Hillary fake news when it caught up with Cameron Harris, a recent Davidson College graduate and Trump supporter, who was responsible for a “masterpiece” of fake news on his “Christian Times” website. His headline said: “Tens of Thousands of Fraudulent Clinton Votes Found in Ohio Warehouse.” Harris invented a janitor, purloined a picture of British ballot boxes from the Internet, and cooked up the whole thing right from his kitchen table. And the story was shared with six million people! Like the Georgian hacker, Harris claimed that his only motive was money. He made about $5,000 in a few days but said that the most important thing was that he learned something. “At first it kind of shocked me,” he said, “how easily people would believe it. It was almost like a sociological experiment.” — Lee McIntyre, Post-Truth, 216
Categorization
- XREF: Connects to viral falsity research (Vosoughi et al.) showing falsehood spreads faster than truth on social platforms. — connects to: Fake news made up under 6 percent of the 2016 media diet — Sander van der Linden, Foolproof: Why Misinformation Infects…, 524
- SEED: An essay angle: the kitchen-table fake-news economy — how lone amateurs outcompeted professional journalism for reach with near-zero production cost.
Broader Connections
- Fake news made up under 6 percent of the 2016 media diet
#complicates(0.85) — Sander van der Linden, Foolproof, 524