On Friday’s broadcast of HBO’s “Real Time,” host Bill Maher criticized pushes to deal with social media disinformation for always focusing “on the producers, never the consumers, as if we’re all helpless, dumb blondes ready to believe anything” and said that “sorting out the lies from the truth is your job.”
Maher stated, “Since this is Mother’s Day weekend, let’s pause and take a moment to think about how your mother was always there for you, looking after you, and keeping you safe, and then realize, that’s not Twitter’s job. Keeping you safe and sorting out the lies from the truth is your job. When we talk about misinformation, we always focus on the producers, never the consumers, as if we’re all helpless, dumb blondes ready to believe anything — like Donald Trump.”
He continued, “Now, do lies spread faster than they used to? Of course. But so can truth, which, in the Internet age, is always at your fingertips. You just have to learn how to use Google for something other than porn. But this idea that we can clean up Twitter and protect you from fake news and disinformation, it’s so ridiculous. It’s like fact-checking the graffiti on the bathroom wall of a dive bar, we called this number and we didn’t have a good time. People always lie, that’s what people do. Every age is the misinformation age.”
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