Spreading Fake News

NEW RESEARCH indicates that older people are more likely to spread fake news than younger people, Republicans spread more fake news than Democrats, and conservatives invent, disseminate and embrace fake news more than liberals. I'm not making this up, this is from an actual survey, of the sort which are usually pretty accurate. More research is undoubtedly in the works. We need to prove or disprove this survey, beyond any doubt, and find the reasons why it reveals whatever it does. If older people do indeed spread more fake news than the young, maybe its because they're better at it, have more access to media, and have more axes to grind. Fake news is simply one form of telling lies, for which we know definitely that we humans are hard wired. We are compelled by evolutionary imperative, and impelled by inherent nature, to behave deceptively. I will allow as I have heard many a whopper from the right. Do any of these sound familiar? Obama is a Muslim. Obama was born in Africa, not Hawaii. Yes, you've heard those two famous pieces of fake news, from the far Obama hating right. During the entire Obama administration, Donald Trump was repeatedly telling this outright lie, as loudly, to as many people as possible. Not long after becoming president, hew quietly admitted it wasn't true. I know people who spread the rumor that Michelle Obama was a transgender, and had adopted her two daughters. Crazy as that sounds, crazy as that is, it spread quite well among conservatives, and you could just see them undergoing their usual carnival of mental contortions, trying to find ways of believing it. Many succeeded, incredibly. Conservatives often accuse liberals of being socialists, and of deliberately keeping as many people as possible poor, to get more democratic voters, and to expand the government. That idea is, of course, absolutely crazy, but in the world of conservative fake news, crazy sells. Some of the more standard lefty wing accusations against conservative Republicans is that they are greedy, that they are hypocritical to support Trump, because Trump's behavior reveals him to be non Christian, and that they want to deregulate government environmental and economic control because they want the freedom to get richer, and that the Trump corporate tax cut was a give away for the wealthy, and did nothing to help the poor. More recently, of course, the left is circulating the meme that President Trump conspired with the Russians, that he is a criminal, that he should be impeached for being unfit to serve. If this is all fake news, these accusations from the left, fine, so be it. But are they really fake? Spreading fake news is simply lying, whether accidently or not. The telling of an untrue tale. Of the examples above, what stands out is that far right fake news is ludicrous on its face, while the left wing variety has a certain plausibility to it. Trump may or may not be guilty of working with the Russians to get elected. Time will tell. It is not beyond the realm of possibility that economic policies enacted by the wealthy are intended to serve the interests of the wealthy. But we know Obama was not born in Kenya, and we have always known it, so why bother arguing about it? You'd have to ask some extreme right wing nut case.