Trump蘑菇视频 nonexistent popular vote lead
I keep reading that Donald Trump is now leading in the popular vote.
He isn’t.
He never has led.
According to some legitimate vote-counters, Hillary Clinton may end up with as many as two million more votes than Trump.
Yet, one fake news web site claims that, “FINAL ELECTION 2016 NUMBERS: TRUMP WON BOTH POPULAR (62.9 M – 62.2 M ) AND ELECTORAL COLLEGE.”
That’s all it’s taken for many of Trump’s followers to use that misinformation as proof that protesting the results of the presidential election is a fool’s errand.
Yet those people who post those phony election results on their Facebook pages, never stopped to take note of the fact that a web site called “70news.wordpress.com,” looks like it was created by a fifth grader with an outdated computer.
That’s the world in which we live.
Anybody with a computer can say anything, no matter how it lacks truth, and people will believe it.
Those people who do, are merely hoping that the lie is the truth.
After Donald Trump used his trusty (but not trustworthy) Twitter account to tweet, “Now professional protesters, incited by the media, are protesting,” less than two days after the election, his faithful supports responded.
There’d been no proof that protesters nationwide had been paid to flood the streets of America to indicate their displeasure with the election’s outcome.
Yet, up popped supposed Craigslist ads that revealed that there was somebody willing to pay people who’d take to the streets.
Those ads, by the way, had been taken out weeks before election day.
How somebody would know that Trump would win, and he should be the target of the protests, is beyond me.
Worse, one energetic guy down in Austin, Texas, began tweeting pictures of buses that had deposited protesters to his town, as if they’d been chartered by people paying armies of malcontents.
“”Here are the buses they came in,” tweeted Eric Tucker of Austin.
But Tucker not only admitted he hadn’t taken the pictures of the buses, but he later tweeted that, “There’s a pretty good case those buses were for a conference.”
They had nothing to do with any protests.
What’s shocking is that Tucker’s initial tweet about the “professional protesters” was retweeted 16,000 times in two days. Yet, his admission that he’d not seen a single professional protester, and that the pictures he tweeted had nothing to do with any protests – only received eight retweets.
Turner learned a valuable lesson. That, “People are surprisingly uninterested in truth but very interested in what helps them make their own case.”
Well, it’s too late for that now. The internet has exploded with all kinds of made up stories that now quote people who’ve been paid to appear at anti-Trump rallies.
“Donald Trump Protester Speaks Out: ‘I Was Paid $3,500 To Protest Trump’s Rally,'” says a headline at abcnews.com.co. An eager Trump supporter might not care that the “co” at the end of that web site address has nothing to do with ABC News. It just fits their narrative.
It’s not that only Republicans, Trump supporters or conservatives advance non-truth, or half-truth to prove they’re right, and those who oppose their views are wrong. There are many liberal, Democratic and Hillary Clinton supporting web sites that perform the same dysfunction.
There’re so many of these false and misleading “news” sources, that a college professor, (Melissa Zimdars of Merrimack College) has compiled a lengthy list of them.
It’s been estimated that 44% of U.S. adults get their news from Facebook.
Facebook is a nice breeding ground for people to find and share information that’s easily refuted, but only, of course, if the truth doesn’t matter to them.
In recent weeks, some social media platforms have vowed to become more scrupulous about allowing fake and misleading information from gumming up their works.
In the meantime, people will still believe Trump has pulled ahead in the popular vote, I guess.
Edward A. Owens is a three time Emmy Award winner and 20-year veteran of television news. E-mail him at freedoms@bellatlantic.net