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Showing posts from February, 2017

The Problem of Fake News

For as long as I can remember, there has been fake news out there, from yellow journalism to paid advertising made to appear as news.   Advertising itself has in recent years gone to absolutely crazy levels of faking real life so as to make the two virtually indistinguishable.   There is a story by Jon Ronson of a group in England that faked a meteor impact in the country side, a crypto advertising campaign during a soccer match involved a Barcelona player and a spectator that threw a banana on the pitch, the player nonchalantly picked up the banana and ate it before serving up a corner kick, the whole event meant to advertise the campaign against racism in ‘football.’   There are countless of these stories.   In the 1930s yellow journalism spearheaded by the psychopath robber baron William R. Hearst, in a vast conspiracy with likeminded new-aristocrats like Dupont, made marijuana illegal for the next 80 years, only so they could have a monopoly in the paper and tree pulp market.