I don’t like Elon Musk so much.
Yes, citizen journalism is probably a major wave of the future, a wave, not the only wave.
But right-wing talk radio and social media seems to move rapidly from one urban legend to the next. And if some are disproved [and a lot more energy to disprove something], the heck with it, we’re already three legends down the road.
The classic example might be “PizzaGate,” in which rightwingers claimed that basically some random pizza restaurant in Washington, DC, was the head of some child sex abuse ring run by Democrats.
And it agitated some guy I think from (?) North Carolina sufficiently enough so that he drove all the way to D.C., went in there with a rifle, fired a shot or two through the ceiling. Demanded that some side room be opened up where some tables were being stored.
I think he ended up serving time for this. But these profit-making people spreading these clever and juicy lies on this didn’t even face civil lawsuits.
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Or, look at all the wild stuff people end up believing about Covid.