• thesmokingman@programming.dev
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    1 month ago

    This is why you can’t use The Independent for shit especially during election season.

    “I haven’t seen the joke. Maybe it’s a stupid racist joke, maybe it’s not,” Vance said.

    “I’m not going to comment on the specifics of the joke, but I think that we have to stop getting so offended at every little thing in the United States of America. I’m just I’m so over it.”

    If you send this article to someone who wants to vote for Trump, they are going to correctly excoriate you. I know this because the last time I used The Independent this was was 2016 when Trump first and The Independent couldn’t back up its headlines then. In the last eight years it still can’t. If we take Vance at face value, which we know we can’t but we have to since that’s the quote The Independent chose to use to create their headline, it’s fake news.

    In general, The Independent generates clickbait headlines that pull in a specific group of people that want to agree with the article and won’t verify who then send it to another group of people who will engage with the content to try and verify. This increases their engagement while spreading a mix of blatant lies and loose misinformation. Your life will be better if you filter out The Independent (something I haven’t yet bothered to do on Lemmy but did immediately on a new Reddit account; election season might finally change this) especially if you’re the audience for the headlines.