Nearly nine months after President Donald Trump’s victory in the presidential election, not a single Trump voter has come forward to declare that he or she was tricked into voting for Trump by so-called “Fake News” websites or deceptive social media bots.
62,984,825 Americans voted for Trump in the November election. Of those 62.984825 million voters, not one person has made the claim that they intended to vote for Hillary Clinton but changed their mind after being duped by a misleading article or piece of information on social media. The mainstream media has not presented a single interview or document to support Clinton’s theory that low-information voters were hoodwinked into last-minute changes of heart due to supposedly factually inaccurate alternative news items.
98 percent of Trump supporters said they did not regret their vote in April — with enough time having passed to discern whether the news items that influenced their vote were real or not — and the 2 percent who reportedly regretted their vote did not mention being tricked.
Facebook is funding a Harvard Kennedy School of Government programĀ with advisers from companies including Crowdstrike, the embattled Democratic Party contractor accused by a top hacker of creating the fake Russian hacker Guccifer 2.0. But Facebook has not put forth evidence of any election manipulation that occurred on its platform.
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Hillary Clinton is also urging social media companies to adopt stricter moderating procedures to fight so-called “Fake News” like the kind she believes helped Trump defeat her soundly in the election.
Neoconservative senator Marco Rubio spoke at a recent Senate hearingĀ (in which Democrat Joe Manchin absurdly claimed that the Russians were trying to influence Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania) about so-called Russian Twitter bots that supposedly blasted out information during the campaign.
“Are Twitterbots really espionage? Is that illegal?,” I asked him in the hallway.
“Next question,” Rubio said, refusing to answer.
Quora’s question “Do you think many Americans were tricked into voting for Trump, by relying on fake news as their source of information?” has three replies.
“No we were not, you actually have it backwards. Trump supporters looked at real news, whereas anti-Trump people saw the fake news. In fact, āFake Newsā is a title applied to anything critiquing Clinton, or bringing het scandals to life,” says one answer.
“No, anyone who believed the fake news simply confirmed their own biases. They were going to vote for Trump anyway,” said another.
“No. Trump voters are scum. If they believed lies, it’s only because they chose to,” said a third.
Trump supporters decry the Russia witch hunt as a “hoax.” In fact, the Fake News narrative was bolstered shortly after the election by a man the Washington Post identified as a “serial hoaxer.”
“I think Donald Trump is in the White House because of me,” said a hoax news writer named Paul Horner, whose claim was reported by the Washington Post on November 17.Ā The Hill ran the headline “Fake news giant: I feel bad about putting Trump in the White House.” The narrative was established days after the election.
It would not be illegal, or discrediting of the election, if it was revealed that a handful of people regretted their votes because they saw a credulous social media post and momentarily grew angry enough to head to the polls to vote for Trump. But no evidence exists to suggest that such people exist, and no purported Fake News victims are willing to expose themselves to the intellectual scrutiny that would go along with making such a claim.
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