I thought [Trump supporters] would fact-check it, and it’d make them look worse. I mean that’s how this always works: Someone posts something I write, then they find out it’s false, then they look like idiots. But Trump supporters — they just keep running with it! They never fact-check anything! Now…
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Paul Horner
Paul Horner is a contributor to fake news websites. 2Lead writer for National Report He was lead writer of the fake-news website National Report since the site's launch. One of his widest-spread fake stories was a piece claiming that artist Banksy had been arrested and his identity revealed as Paul Horner, which Horner posted in 2013 and was re-circulated in 2014. 2Departure and launch of News Examiner Horner left National Report in 2014, launched News Examiner at the start of 2015 and also started numerous websites including cnn.com.de, cbsnews.com.co and nbc.com.co to post fake news articles, as well as ABCnews.com.co. In 2015 he wrote a fake story that Yelp was suing South Park that received wide circulation, as did another story that a man named "Paul Horner" had undergone the world's first head transplant. By 2015 he had written several fake stories about DeQuincy, Louisiana, which said that the town had been under attack from gay zombies, had legalized polygamy, and had banned twerking, discussing the color of any dress (in response to the viral story about the dress), and Koreans; he told a local news station that he originally targeted it because "my friend Brandon Adams said there is like 4,000 people that live there, and all they do is drink Old Milwaukee's Best and beat their wives" and that he kept targeting it because he had received death and castration threats in response to his first story. One of his stories about DeQuincy, and one that he says is one of his favorites; was about a man who stopped a robbery in a diner by quoting Pulp Fiction; the story was posted on the Miramax website. 22016 U.S. presidential election His stories had an "enormous impact" on the 2016 U.S. presidential election according to CBS News; they consistently appeared in Google's top news search results, were shared widely on Facebook, and were taken seriously and shared by third parties such as Trump presidential campaign manager Corey Lewandowski, Eric Trump, ABC News, and the Fox News Channel. Horner later claimed that his work during this period was intended "to make Trump's supporters look like idiots for sharing my stories". In a November 2016 interview with The Washington Post, Horner expressed regret for the role his fake news stories played in the election and surprise at how gullible people were in treating his stories as new
My sites were picked up by Trump supporters all the time. I think Trump is in the White House because of me. His followers don’t fact-check anything — they’ll post everything, believe anything. His campaign manager posted my story about a protester getting paid $3,500 as fact. Like, I made that up.…
Honestly, people are definitely dumber. They just keep passing stuff around. Nobody fact-checks anything anymore — I mean, that’s how Trump got elected. He just said whatever he wanted, and people believed everything, and when the things he said turned out not to be true, people didn’t care because…