Most people (if not all) will fall for it, but once you understand your error in judgment and accept that you're fallible, you spend more time questioning the story -- even searching for supporting details online -- rather than instantly accepting and echoing it.
The further you are to the fringe of beliefs (left and right), the easier it is to pull you in through confirmation bias. Because the facts of the real world do not readily align with an extremist's view, whenever one is offered up a snippet of (fake) news that would provide validation of one's views, it is accepted at face value as truth.
Yesterday, while the rest of us were eating turkey and stuffing, WaPo posted an article about the findings from two independent research teams covering Russian propaganda efforts through fake news:
Russia’s increasingly sophisticated propaganda machinery — including thousands of botnets, teams of paid human “trolls,” and networks of websites and social-media accounts — echoed and amplified right-wing sites across the Internet as they portrayed Clinton as a criminal hiding potentially fatal health problems and preparing to hand control of the nation to a shadowy cabal of global financiers. The effort also sought to heighten the appearance of international tensions and promote fear of looming hostilities with nuclear-armed Russia.
I have seen this effect, specifically at Breitbart, but also constantly spilling over into more mainstream sites such as The Hill and the network news outlets, and occasionally leaking into liberal sites. Some of these propagandists would simply copy and paste their propaganda, but then doing so would expose the truth of their work as you could then copy and paste their own words into a search engine to track their progress around the world.
Sidenote: Hey Google, just because I frequently access Breitbart and Info Wars does not mean that I am interested in such fringe sources! Yet, ironically, it was your algorithms that kept shooting fake news from the far-right into my Google News feed, that alerted me as to what was going on, particularly how you were using blogs as a source of news.
Often (not always) when such political propaganda (from the far left and right) spilled into liberal outlets, the first thing you'd see was a demand for the source of information, followed by detailed, intelligent retort to reveal the truth about the propaganda, and finally, the original comment shut down while leaving the responses intact -- if you want to study the contrasts in liberal and conservative audiences, pay close attention to the comment sections. The Russians may have had a troll army, but liberals had self-organized into an anti-troll army.
Sidenote #2: While it may seem that liberals are anti-Russian, the truth of the matter is that liberals don't give a shit about Russia in the manner Russians have come to conceptualize American geopolitics. Through American politics, Russians have two basic choices: A party that doesn't give a shit about Russia even as it appeals to nationalism at times, and one that harbors existential fears about Russia even as it is being led by a useful idiot.
So how do you avoid fake news? You can't; propagandists don't simply give up and walk away. The best you can do is to identify the fake news and treat it as fake. While others can walk away, my modus operandi is to go after the useful idiots and mock them relentlessly, while working to shut down those social accounts used by the propagandists.
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