This is why I believe it is important to teach our children from first principles; we can no longer rely on media, left or right, to convey a large percentage of truth. I am old enough that the cliche "believe only half of what you read" is still good advice. Too many people glued to their devices, knee-jerk responses without much thought and propagate misinformation at almost the speed of electrons without consulting their slower-thinking, rational mind. I find relief in going back to first principles for many things now even if it is time consuming.
I lived in Macau for 7 years and Indonesia for 1 year. I used a VPN when I first arrived in Macau due to trips to the mainland. Hong Kongers are looking for VPNs like crazy this week, since the CCP announced new efforts to monitor "trouble makers" in HK. HK will never be the same.
In Steven Levy's new book (which I really liked), Facebook: The Inside Story, he talks about teenagers in Macedonia pushing fake political news stories to drive traffic to their ad-laden websites so they could make money.
They didn't care about the political content, the incentive was to figure out what would get shared the most/fastest so they could drive traffic. They tried fake news targeting the left, but it wouldn't get very far because people would call it out in comments and then the posters would delete/remove it.
Fake news targeting the right (primarily crazy anti-hillary stories) would spread without any resistance and drive a ton of traffic, so they ended up focusing their attention there.
I think this is pretty good evidence that there's a bigger problem on the right since the Macedonian teenagers didn't care about the politics and just wanted to drive traffic for money.
There are lots of other interesting details in that book - it's good.
I didn't write false or fake news. I wrote we cannot rely on media, left or right, to convey a large percentage of truth. My comment is more one of bias, and if you think bias is mainly a right thing, and very little bias on the left well,...to paraphrase David Foster Wallace's short parable: "Water? What's water?" - a fish.
