I almost feel this is too easy but really, no Tartary collection could be complete without him.
Originally shared by Rhys Taylor
Completely bizarre and woefully misguided. Worth reading its entirety but here’s the condensed version.
Blair spent more than two decades as a construction worker, a trade that took a toll on his body. In the late 2000s, when the Great Recession hit and his industry slumped, he started looking for another source of income in liberal political blogging. But although it was fun and a few people started reading, blogging didn’t pay. And so he tried another tactic. He began to write fabricated tales that looked like real news headlines. Streams of consciousness flowed from his head to the keyboard.
When he saw the results online, the hundreds and thousands of likes and shares his posts were getting, he felt validated. Far more people were interested in fake news than Blair’s opinions or true stories.
He took on the personas of patriotic Americans outraged at President Obama, liberals, feminists, the Black Lives Matter movement and more. He delighted in people who took the lies for the truth and shared the stories as if they had come from real news websites. The success of the fakes led Blair to create a Facebook page called America’s Last Line of Defense. It was dedicated to fake news stories aimed at staunch Republicans and supporters of President Donald Drumpf.
The headlines were sensational and sometimes even offensive. They had one aim – to provoke an emotional response that would get people to share them. Blair himself describes the headlines he wrote as “racist and bigoted”. But they went viral – and those shares turned into clicks, which turned into cash.
Satire – not news, not opinion, and not propaganda – is how Blair [a committed liberal Democrat] describes his work. His aim is to trick conservative Americans into sharing false news, in the hope of showing what he calls their “stupidity”.
“We’ve gone out of our way to market it as satire, to make sure that everybody knows that this isn’t real,” he says, pointing out that some of his pages have more prominent disclaimers than the world-famous satire site The Onion.
Once his stories go viral, the Facebook comments burst forth. And that’s when Christopher Blair the fake news writer becomes Christopher Blair the crusading left-wing troll. The faker becomes the exposer, weeding out and reporting the most extreme users among his fans.
“I can show you hundreds of profiles we’ve had taken down,” he says. He claims that he’s exposed Ku Klux Klan members and hardcore racists. “We’ve had people fired from their jobs,” he says. “We’ve exposed them to their families. Say what you want about me being a monster. I’m pretty proud.”
Yeah, sure, expose and shame the chronic lunatics, but could you please do that without feeding the fires of hyperpartisan politics ? If you have to fake news – and you don’t – couldn’t you write fake stories that would work in favour of your (professed) own liberal policies rather than against them ?
Mad as clams.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/resources/idt-sh/the_godfather_of_fake_news//cdn.embedly.com/widgets/platform.js
Tattered Remains of Tartary 