The article that I choose was written by Paul Joseph Watson on Infowars, a popular far right wing “news” site that often has fake news in its headlines. For example, this article is titled “Report: Three Million Votes in Presidential Election Cast by Illegal Aliens” and claims just what you think it does, that three million votes in the 2016 election were cast by illegal aliens and should not be counted. This seems to hit a lot of the checklist for articles designed to grab the attention of racist people, referring to people as illegal aliens, wildly inaccurate claims about vote numbers with no proof, and it actually blames the entire thing on states that it thinks allowed these votes, which are mostly blue states. This post was written in the United States, as infowars is a US based “news” company, but it seems to be more attempting to draw up resentment against immigrants and Democrats rather than trying to sway the votes of any particular demographic.

    This article was pretty easy to spot as a fake news article, mostly because it was proven false almost immediately after it was published, just 9 days after it was put up on Infowars, the Miami Herald had already pointed out all the flaws in the post. For example, there isn’t any actual proof in the article about how or even if 3 million people had voted. The article is mostly taken up by some tweets each claiming the same thing but never proving it, and this is all not to mention that Politifact picked up the story and rated the claim as false. I doubt this article would have fooled me but honestly I don’t think it’s meant to fool anyone. Most normal people don’t believe that such a large number of illegitimate votes could have possibly been counted, but this article is meant to retain the audience it has, not attempt to draw new viewers. It’s far easier to continue pandering to racist, ignorant people instead of attempting to persuade people with an actual viewpoint.