TOBY SHAPSHAK: Fanning the flame of fake news
Disinformation and conspiracy theories abound on YouTube, which prioritises video views over accuracy
Forget Reddit — YouTube is the cesspool of the Internet. In this hand-wringing phase of the evils of social media, much has been made about Reddit, the chat site that is a haven for conspiracy theories and right-wing hatred. The site — which has prided itself on not "interfering" in its readers’ discourse — recently shut down numerous discussion boards linked to hate-mongering and outlandish theories. The spark for this was the horrific shooting at US high school Marjory Stoneman Douglas, where 17 people were killed by another mentally unbalanced person who could freely buy an assault rifle. Immediately after the tragedy, a maelstrom of propaganda emerged about "crisis actors" and other patent nonsense. I’d never heard of this odd phrase, which will go down in history as one of the nastiest forms of propaganda. What kind of person describes the teenage survivors of a gun massacre as actors, pretending to be victims so as to "take our guns away"? The nexus for spreading such conspira...
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