In an era when news travels like a game of “telephone,” a nomadic con man is using the internet to manipulate clueless Republicans. The best — or maybe worst — part? He’s getting rich doing it.
Playing on Fear and Ignorance
Paris Wade is a 26-year-old former restaurant worker living in Long Beach, California. After their advertising business failed, Wade and his business partner, Ben Goldman, needed a plan. They found it in the world of sensationalist fake news. The pair began writing news stories for an alt-right website in 2015, and quickly realized that sensationalism sold, and the truth was secondary — if it factored in at all.
Wade and Goldman learned that it wasn’t hard to manipulate the fears of many Republicans. They sometimes use the same headlines for multiple articles, regardless of whether the content has any connection to the headline. Wade explains:
“…I’ve used this headline a thousand times. Violence and chaos and aggressive wording is what people are attracted to… There’s not a ton of thought put into it… Other than it frames the story so it gets a click.
“We’re the new yellow journalists… We’re the people on the side of the street yelling that the world is about to end.”
Goldman adds:
“Our audience does not trust the mainstream media… It’s definitely easier to hook them with that.”
The people who visit Wade and Goldman’s website, LibertyWritersNews, aren’t the type to concern themselves with things like checking facts and looking for credible sources. The personal messages, comments, and reviews on their Facebook page illustrate the collective ignorance of the audience:
“YOU ARE THE ONLY ONE I TRUST TO REPORT THE TRUTH”
No News Is… Not News
Very informative? Not quite.
LibertyWritersNews feeds into Republicans’ confirmation bias. There is no real information being reported, but people are seeing what they want to believe. With a simple click, they can share the story, “proving” that what they believe has been confirmed.
Each time someone clicks on a story, Wade and Goldman get a little bit richer, and that’s the bottom line. Republicans don’t even realize they’re being manipulated, as they obey the command to comment on each video and post. Each comment shows the post to a few more people, each share causes a few more uninformed people to gasp in horror, and so it goes.
It’s almost embarrassing, for the people being conned. Many of them clearly believe what they’re being fed. The real problem is that when people take these stories as truth, there’s no room for the real story. They vote based on what they think they know, and we end up here, with a president-elect who’s just as ignorant and sad as they are.
Featured Image via Pexels/CC0
