The Race to Weaponize Empathy
The story with &quot;fake news&quot; is pretty straightforward, if you want to take a second to understand it.<p>It began with an actual, technical phenomenon: a brand of webspam designed to solicit clicks by running lurid, Weekly World News grade political stories on auto-generated news sites filled with (if you checked their backcatalog) crazy stories like the Pope consorting with demons. There were dozens of these sites, built with scripts, and they were literally what the label we stuck on their tin said: &quot;fake news&quot;.<p>Then, deploying the rhetorical jujitsu Frank Luntz was so successful at popularizing on the right, Trump co-opted the term. &quot;Fake news&quot; wasn&#x27;t webspam sites filled with literal manufactured news having no connection to reality or for that matter physics, but instead any news a partisan disagreed with.<p>So effective were Trump supporters that the term &quot;fake news&quot; has lost all meaning, and sucks all the oxygen out of conversations in which it&#x27;s used.<p>This article captures none of that story, because it&#x27;s a partisan political piece written by a (literal) partisan Trump supporter unaware of the irony of the deceptive point they&#x27;re trying to make.