President Donald Trump and his supporters have frequently railed against reputable news organizations like the Washington Post and CNN as “fake news.” On February 21, a man named James McDaniel began a news site called the Underground Report, focusing on right-wing stories to appeal to Team Donald Trump.
Billing his site as “Real News You Won’t Get From The Mainstream Media,” the Underground Report focused on publishing sensational articles that only someone like Alex Jones could buy into.
Some of the stories from the site include gems like:
- “WikiLeaks: Obama Ran Pedophile Ring Out Of The White House”
- “Obama Tweet: Trump Must Be Removed, By Any Means Necessary”
- “Former White House Aid: Obama ‘Is A Gay Man'”
Recently, The Underground Report published a new, more enlightening story, entitled “BREAKING: Satire Makes Fools Of Gullible Trump Supporters.”
In it, the McDaniel breaks down just what he has been doing with his website, establishing it as something of a sociology experiment to see just what people would and would not believe when they found news stories that aligned with their world view.
The results were rather disheartening.
In a little over a week, he reports that despite the ridiculous nature of some of his articles (and a disclaimer at the bottom of each story stating they were not based in reality), his site:
- Had more than one million unique visitors
- Generated thousands of comments on the stories
- Had hundreds of thousands of shares on social media
- Even generated a following on YouTube, with people creating informational videos about his stories, like this one, from the YouTube account ExposedTruth:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MEmaRHg8-ZY
In his admission post, McDaniel explains what the Underground Report was all about:
“While writing [these stories], I was aiming for stories that no one would believe, but rather would be satirical in an age where disinformation is so prevalent. Just for fun, I decided to post some of the stories in Trump fan groups on Facebook to see the reactions. To my surprise, the Trump groups embraced the stories as fact, almost universally. It seemed that there wasn’t anything I could write that was too wild or outrageous to be believed by this particular audience.”
He also claims that the comments on his stories are both “frightening and hilarious.”
It does not seem like his admission will dent the “fake news” train. The top comment on his story where he admits that his site is completely made up reads:
“Funny, I did’t fall for your FAKE STORIES, but FYI…Obama IS gay…there are TWO dead people that testified to it…so…you are proud of yourself for spreading FAKE news, huh? POS rag. [sic]”
This is the world we live in.
Featured Image via Pixabay user Pixel2013 / CC0 1.0
