Last Call For Screaming Into The Abyss

Washington Post columnist Caitlyn Dewey got a year and a half out of her weekly feature fighting The Stupid before hanging it up this week and correctly arriving at the conclusion that you can't beat confirmation bias in the age of the internet.

We launched “What was Fake” in May 2014 in response to what seemed, at the time, like an epidemic of urban legends and Internet pranks: light-hearted, silly things, for the most part, like new flavors of Oreos and babies with absurd names.

Since then, those sorts of rumors and pranks haven’t slowed down, exactly, but the pace and tenor of fake news has changed. Where debunking an Internet fake once involved some research, it’s now often as simple as clicking around for an “about” or “disclaimer” page. And where a willingness to believe hoaxes once seemed to come from a place of honest ignorance or misunderstanding, that’s frequently no longer the case. Headlines like “Casey Anthony found dismembered in truck” go viral via old-fashioned schadenfreude — even hate.

There’s a simple, economic explanation for this shift: If you’re a hoaxer, it’s more profitable. Since early 2014, a series of Internet entrepreneurs have realized that not much drives traffic as effectively as stories that vindicate and/or inflame the biases of their readers. Where many once wrote celebrity death hoaxes or “satires,” they now run entire, successful websites that do nothing but troll convenient minorities or exploit gross stereotypes. Paul Horner, the proprietor of Nbc.com.co and a string of other very profitable fake-news sites, once told me he specifically tries to invent stories that will provoke strong reactions in middle-aged conservatives. They share a lot on Facebook, he explained; they’re the ideal audience.

The primary feature of the internet is, not to put too fine a point on it, the Speed Of Total Bullshit.  It's a feature, not a bug.  It directly results in things like fewer than half of Iowa Republicans believe President Obama was born in the US.  It's demonstrably true that he was, but the people who need facts the most are the least swayed by them.

This is America, a country where quite literally the facts no longer matter.