4 ms·

Except that one of the examples of fake news that the media have leapt on was just some random person making an bad assumption and it going viral: http://www.ny

• acdha 10y ago
  That's because the Trump campaign was literally built on propaganda starting with the claims about Obama's birth certificate which really started getting him supporters. He didn't need to invent the story to take advantage of it as one of the most prominent voices spreading it, and sites like Breitbart or abcnews.com.co profited enormously from people who believed there was a real story that the real news organizations wouldn't cover. The paid protesters story is a great example: the campaign benefited from and recirculated rumors about that which started on random blogs, conspiracy sites like InfoWars, and outright fakes like abcnews.com.co throughout the election. The guy who tweeted that photo might have been a Republican acting in what he believed was good faith but he was primed to think of that as likely by the prior months of unfounded accusations and as soon as he shared that photo, it was widely circulated by supporters including Corey Lewandowski, who was Trump's campaign manager before becoming CNN's commenter representing the campaign.