Jeremy Riddle
Jul 28, 2017 · 1 min read

Some of the reporting on the subject has been both distressingly ill-informed and subsumed by partisan political motives. I have a group on Facebook devoted to discussion of the American political scene and I’m an admin on several others. One of the facts of life when you’re doing either is that there is a seemingly endless array of fake profiles by, among other things, people claiming to be from out-of-the-way foreign locales. Nigeria, Macedonia, Panama, Kenya. It isn’t particularly credible that half of the population of Nigeria suddenly became interested in statehouse races in U.S. states; if you see this day after day, you conclude these are either people who don’t use their real identities in the interest of privacy or are folks looking to make money in the lucrative traffic-generation business, which is where most fake “news” originates. If, on the other hand, you’re a Clintonite writer, you decide this is evidence of a Russian troll army. That’s how a pair of Huffpost Clintonites actually presented it in a piece back in March that has been circulated all over the internet ever since. I have no doubt the irony of this — basically a fake news story about fake news — is entirely lost on its authors.