[techostritch]

The narrative a lot of people seem to adopt is that the fake news debate is about limiting the types of messaging and propaganda available to two sides of a political system. And so attacking fake news is only about attacking the tools available to the other side.

I think what’s wrong about this narrative is the idea that fake news is good for the people spreading it. Like I don’t think that obsessing about the Russia investigation was great for liberals and I think there’s a ton of examples of Republican infighting that is the result of people believing things that aren’t true, and just like factually so. There’s a difference between spreading all sorts of malicious opinions about LGBT; and I’m not happy about that but whatever and the recent story of a woman who got elected to the school board to get the LGBT curricula out of schools, read the whole curricula, realized that there was no LGBT curricula in schools, told her supporters how happy she was to realize that and then was viciously attacked for it. Or the guy who actually attacked a pizza restaurant, or the Romney campaign being surprised they lost in 2012, because they believed a conservative propaganda site performing intentionally biased polling to show a not favorable result.

Like looking at the current American political situation, I think you could make a strong argument that fake news is worse for Republicans than it is for Democrats.