New York Times, June 2024
On the morning of Jan 6, 2021, Christopher Blair’s fake news empire was humming along. Blair had been earning as much as US$15,000 in some months by posting false stories to Facebook about Democrats and the election, reaching millions of people each month.
But after a mob of Trump supporters attacked the US Capitol, his growing enterprise came to an abrupt halt. Facebook seemed to recognise its own role in fomenting an insurrection and tweaked its algorithm to limit the spread of political content, fake and otherwise. Blair watched his engagement flatline.
“It just kind of crashed – anything political crashed for about six months,” he said. Today, though, Blair has fully recovered, and then some. His false posts – which he insists are satire intended to mock conservatives – are receiving more interactions on Facebook than ever, surging to 7.2 million interactions already this year compared with 1 million in all of 2021.
