06 January, 2016

the savviest dupes | Fredrik deBoer

the savviest dupes | Fredrik deBoer: "Today, dozens of journalists and hundreds of their followers were effortlessly rolled by an unverified Twitter account that compared conservative moron Ammon Bundy to beloved Civil Rights activist Rosa Parks. A bunch of predictable pieces got posted; a thousand outraged tweets were sent into the wild. And all without anyone bothering  to consider the fact that any random person can start a Twitter account. One journalist — one– bothered to actually check the facts. MSNBC’s Tony Dokoupil, who’s on the ground at the site in question, asked Bundy, and Bundy said the Twitter account is not real. The account also posted while Bundy was chatting with journalists. Dokoupil actually did his job. Meanwhile, a ton of people who base their whole self-conception on the idea that they are savvier and smarter than everyone else got played for fools, because the narrative played so perfectly into their assumptions.

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