#like the original tweet is real. ive seen it on the account

[crunchycrystals]

is this the real alice oseman?????? did alice oseman make a tweet for an unauthorized fan treatise???????

[staysocky]

answering a handful of asks under the cut !!

answers & replies here are generally:

brush settings

misc. responses

(MANY OF THESE I’M ANSWERING...VERY LATE.... IM SO SORRY FOR THE DELAY I JUST WANTED TO WAIT A BIT SO I COULD COMPILE EVERYTHING ALL TOGETHER.....)

Anonymous said: Hello friend may I ask about your brush settings? Because I am in love with your colouring and line work!

Anonymous said: Your art is so cute! What brushes do you use?

Answer: i main SAI2 now, but here are the same settings when i was using them in the original SAI!! 

(i just copied my own settings in SAI2 now so they should work the same... also sometimes i use the marker tool for doodling nowadays)

Anonymous said: do you post speedpaints anywhere? i'd love to see your painting process! your art style is phenomenal hngh 

Anonymous said: Do you have a youtube channel? Just wondering, since I can't seem to find it. I'd like to watch some speedpaints or something .u.

Anonymous said: could do you a tutorial on how you color hair??? its so pretty and baffles me all the time

Anonymous said: Would you ever do a tutorial showing how you draw? I've see you post on how you color but not lineart (ps your style is super duper cute!!)

Anonymous said: Ayy ;3c hello stocky, your art is amazing ;; how is your process for color your drawings? Plz need to know! God bless you♥

Anonymous said: How do you color soooo well? Can I get some tips? ( ;n; )

Answer: i’ve sometimes done lil art streams for friends before! i could use the same capture software to make speedpaints sometime.... i’ve been considering it for a while actually! 

my process can be a lil sloppy when i try to break it down into steps for tutorials so i think the best way to show + explain is through art streams (& video process)... 

i was thinking of starting art streams on twitch in the near future too... it’s just when i’ll finally be able to get setup finally that i’d be able to set a streaming schedule

Anonymous said: I never played Megaman but I used to watch my older brother play it, and I finally started playing it because of your art too lmao (i love it)

Answer: MEGAMAN GOOD!!! im so glad you’re enjoying the series now too!!

Anonymous said: Socky, will you restock the sanic charms (the knuckles and tails link one) or make other characters?? i love them !

Answer: THANK YOU i’m glad u like em!! each time they sell out i do plan to restock them so no worries!! 👍 I AM AIMING TO MAKE MORE CHARMS OF OTHER SONIC CHARACTERS TOO they’ll come eventually when i’m able to make the designs & get them ordered!!

Anonymous said: ((whispers, this may have been asked before and I wasn't sure where to ask it, but what does "i tried my best x5" mean? is it a reference to something? ;;))

Answer: OH NO WORRIES I’LL CLEAR IT UP!! it’s in reference to a youtube user’s rp comments as “kagamine len”. i’ve seen it MANY years ago & at that time it became sorta an inside joke between me & my friends. 

later i referenced/used it as a response a few times on my len askblog to keep it going.

it’s a small lil thing i guess but i’ve sorta adopted the saying now haha

Anonymous said: socks r gr8 doncha think

Anonymous said: ookay im going to sleep now sorry

Answer: no come back you are valid !!

Anonymous said: your aRT gives me heARTATTACKKKS

Answer: BREATHE, ANON

Anonymous said: I JUST FOUND YOUR BLOG AND I LOVE YOUR ART STYLE! <3

Anonymous said: Wanted to say I absolutely love your art and how you draw the Kagamines. Please keep it up!

Anonymous said: HELLO I JUST. WANNA SAY I ADORE YOUR ART AND BLOGS !! KEEP UP THE GOOD WORK AND I ALSO WISH YOU ALL THE BEST !!

Anonymous said: your art makes me cry out of joy. I am actually crying because your style makes me so happy!!!! keep up the good work!! <3

Anonymous said: your artstyle. CUTE

@transjackatlas​ said: you art style is absolutely adorable 💙💚💕

@emmi-san​ said: I only wanted to say that I love your art style and the cute representations of the vocaloid songs ✨💕

@tyranart​ said: Your arts wonderful and I hope your day is full of nothing but enjoyment

@thekillermarti​ said: how do you draw so cute?!

@neykoart​ said: YOUR ARTSTYLE IS SO CUTE OH MY GOD YOUR TETO DRAWING WARMS MY HEART SO MUCH

@dumiz-hyper-saiyan​ said:  Hiya! I wanted to ask, how is your art so great!? You are so so talented (I know it’s not really a question but I love your drawings so much! I hope we can be friends cause you seem to be a amazing person!) hehe!♥️

@seraphofivorylight​ said:  (￣▽￣) i just found ur blog today and i want to say i really love how soft ur art is !! its super pleasing to look and i definitely wish i could have some of these as prints to slap onto my wall of posters ✨ keep doing ur good work !! i hope ur doing well !!

Answer: THANK YOU SO MUCHHCH!!!!! i’m glad y’all are enjoying my art u folks are the MVPs & it’s super motivating to get your nice feedback _(┐「ε:)_ 💕 💕 //sends you all my lov e

@moderndayoutsider​ said: Just thought I'd shoot a message and say that I absolutely ADORE your art and you're one of my inspirations <3 God bless! Keep on doing what you're doing! :D

Anonymous said: ahh i wana say that ive been a fan of you for years and youve inspired my own art sm T_T... bout time i told you how much i love ur stuff 💖💖💖

Anonymous said: Woah, I'm a bit new to your blog and I just want to say how cute your art is. I'm literally so glad this was on my recommended. If I hadn't clicked on your blog then I don't know where I would be. To be honest, I would send you this on my real account but I'm actually really afraid to talk to you, and plus I'm really shy heheh. But keep up the good work! You're an inspiration to us all.

Anonymous said: Hi socky!!! I just wanna drop by and say that I love ur art so so so much !! The coloring and shape of it is so appealing and sometimes I spend hours at a time on your social media just marveling your art. It's really pretty!! Keep up the good work ✨✨✨

Answer: sdfgFDGDdsf knowing that u folks are inspired by my works makes it all worth it, i hope u know (;__;💕 💕 thank you so much for sticking around & enjoying!!! it really means A LOT pleas y’all have a lovely week!!

Anonymous said: Do you take commissions?

Anonymous said: Commission?

Answer: I SORTA HAVE COMMISSIONS OPEN tho i take them by a commission form which puts you on a waitlist. i’m more active on my twitter and tweet updates, & handle most contact about them there...

here’s a link to the tweet about my current commission info + the link to the form is inside --> [comm info]

Anonymous said: Where are you from? Your art is so clean and stylish!! 💖✨

@mysticmangaanimepainter​ said: What year u start drawing???😮 

Answer: started drawing wayyy back when i was able to first hold a crayon haha. tho i sorta started paying attention to what i was doing around middle school? started drawing digitally between middle & high school iirc... im from the US also !!

AAAND AGAIN A LOT OF THESE WERE ASKED/SENT VERY LONG AGO.....  & IM SORRY FOR JUST NOW ANSWERING THEM... o+<

but to all who’s sent me nice messages & words of encouragement, thank you so much 😭💕💕💕 i rly appreciate em all & even tho i’m not very responsive here on tumblr i rly like to look at and read the messages from time to time;;;💖

[sly2o]

Season 6 Plot Big Giant Spec Post

A - Major pieces I’m spec’ing for next season when I am feeling semi-confident on spec:

Nightblood is only needed for when BOTH suns are up. 

Clarke will come to view the leader of the peaceful group they meet as a father figure.

“Our People” (Eligius, Delinquents, etc) will be sent on a mission to go mine hytholodium from a nearby asteroid. That hytholodium will be brought back and will power up something important for the finale.

Colonization of the new planet was originally modeled after how England initially settled the New World.

That plan went up in smoke when it was revealed the Earth had gone up in smoke and no subsequent waves of colonizers arrived.

B - Major pieces I am spec’ing that I am low-confident about:

Over the ~200 years that passed since those initial events, the planet split into two major factions: those with nightblood, and those without. 

Nightbloods may be the subjugated class on this new planet. 

 The arrival of our people (Grounders, Eligius, Skykru, etc) will throw the current nightblood v. non-nightblood power balance into flux when it is revealed that the religion that evolved on Earth is one where nightbloods are revered. 

It will become important for the oppressing class to figure out how to control The Flame. 

C - Wilder pieces I am spec’ing:

If the non-nightbloods are the oppressing class, they will power up their version of ALIE in the finale.

OR, if the non-nightbloods are the oppressing class, we will get the AU where the “Mountain Men” got to return to Earth in the finale. 

D - I am personally motivated to spec this, but also I got real reasons

“Unintended Consequences” (or something similar in Trig) will be the name of the Finale

Explanations for why I am spec’ing these things are under the cut, but can majorly be summarized as 1) I read The Sparrow, and 2) assumption that the EligiusIV twitter account is a valid source. 

Warning: contains major spoilers for “The Sparrow” 

A1 - This is implied through the BTS pictures we have of Clarke and Echo on the ground, the fact that “two suns, no sunscreen” was uttered by Shaw, and that in “The Sparrow” there is a species that sleeps through the time of day where only one sun is up. 

A2 -  “Clarke is in a really bad place right now” that Eliza has been saying in interviews, I strongly suspect she is having a similar story to the main character of The Sparrow. In the Sparrow the main character comes to view one of the aliens they meet as a daughter-figure. Clarke already has a daughter-figure (Madi), but Clarke has been missing a father figure for a while now. Plus Jake Griffin was back on set which supports this theory.

A3 - The BTS pictures that came out recently showed our cast on an Eligius vessel which describes a asteroid in the background that had a high amount of hytholodium. A while back there was a summary chart of the fake titles the writers had given to next season’s episodes - including two called “7 days part 1″ and “7 days part 2″ - with a gap in the middle. I strongly believe at minimum a subsection of our known characters will get sent on a mining mission.

A4 and A5 - I’m spec’ing this primarily on how “space colonization” has been stressed in the Eligius IV promo materials. 

To clarify what I am talking about when I say “how England settled the New World” - I specifically am speaking to very early days colonialism (before the American Revolution) when lands were initially being taken away from the First Nations who lived there as England expanded. This is where England would have a white colonizer over there with a plot of land they were setting up for their way of life, and contracts would be made where other white colonizers would become “indentured servants” where they would have a contract drawn up where they got X amount of clothes per year, meals, a place to live, and at the end of 10 years or so of work would be given their own piece of property. Then they would become the lead of their own piece of property - and could coordinate a contract where they get their own indentured servants, and so the cycle repeats. 

The destruction of Earth would have resulted in - to put it mildly - some contract disputes for those who were expecting subsequent waves of people to come to help them set up their own properties. This would set off major conflict among those who settled the new planet.

Particularly a new tweet from EligiusIV specifically mentions “there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves”.

B1-4 - I put these all in a “low-confidence” category because I am uncertain what this “alien” life is and how important it is. My spec is based on a premise that the Alien life is either 1) not really important, or 2) a cute way to say that “we’ve evolved so separately it’s like they are alien to us”. If alien life is a real thing, then a lot of my spec will likely be hogwash. 

B1 - I am spec’ing this because it’s a redux of the Mountain Men vs Grounders, and also because a similar divide is found in The Sparrow. I am also spec’ing this because we know that redblooded people can give birth to people with nightblood. I have assumed that people with nightblood can give birth to people with redblood because otherwise the 100 year evolution that allowed people to reclaim the ground makes no sense. However we don’t really have proof of this thanks to the conclave, and the science/math on this show can be dubious anyways. It’s also another way to divide Clarke from her people which Jason loves to do.

B2 and B3 - This would be a reverse of how the religion on Earth evolved, which would naturally cause conflict, which is part of why I am spec’ing this. 

I am also spec’ing this because 

only the nightbloods would be able to be outside during the day - raising cause for why they are obligated to be the workers

it puts Clarke in the worker class (”let the privileged do the work for a change”)

it implies that that once the redblooded people started to be born that instead of casting them out for being genetically inferior, that work was done initially to protect them. We know Murphy and Clarke are going to be at odds this season, and that them being at odds could in some ways present a different look at “protecting the weak” vs. “taking advantage of the strong” because of how Murphy is tied to Emori who got cast out for being different, and Clarke being tied to this subjugated class. (I hope I explained this properly, since this is a very messy and complicated idea).

The fact that people with redblood worship someone with nightblood would be seen as radical and cause major issue on the new planet. 

An easy way to temporarily placate the masses would be to say that Madi is only raised up as a nightblood because she has The Flame. 

B4 - Irrespective of who the subjugated class is, the fact of the matter remains that a group of people led by a child soldier have landed on this planet and the reason she is raised above others is because she has a chip in her neck. The BTS pictures on the Eligius ship seemed to me to include an electronic schematic of The Flame - which to me begs the question of if they will try to reverse program The Flame this season (or something similar).

I am also low confidence on this one because another thing that could be happening here is that this chip wasn’t meant to last 200 years - and that it is starting to decay in Madi’s head after 125 in cryo, and needs to be repaired. 

Or maybe it’s both things!

C1 - Putting this in the “wild” category for a few reasons. However I will say my primary reason for spec’ing this is because ALIE can relieve pain - and I have to wonder whether she can relieve the pain caused by solar radiation. To me the cascading events here are 1- redblood people can’t access their own mining ship or simply don’t have mining ship, 2- they get Our People to go mine the asteroid, and 3 - they turn on their version of the ALIE1.0 machine in the finale. This presumes the ALIE code was ever sent to these people in the first place. However it is possible it could be retconned that ALIE1.0 was developed as a permanent solution to the “nightbloods don’t always give birth to redbloods” problem - if that indeed was a problem. Also - with the trauma that was caused in the 6 year stay in the bunker, Abby’s addiction being stressed as a longing for the City of Light, and the fact that our main characters are almost evenly divided between those who did and didn’t go to the City of Light - I think the return of ALIE1.0 wouldn’t be so easily defeated. 

C2 - Alternatively, it may be that Abby and Jackson are leveraged because they know (although may be a bit rusty about) the recipe for creating nightblood. They may spend the season recreating that recipe with the scientists on the ground. We did see a BTS picture (that got deleted) where the guy who played Robin Hood on OUAT was in a medical smock and had bits of black on that smock - which may be nightblood. 

Either way for part C - I am anticipating these new “Mountain Men” to find a way to the ground in the finale.

D1 -  Jason has spoken about how Clarke really takes to heart Monty’s message of “be the good guys”. It would follow the plot of The Sparrow, as well as simply fit into the type of show this is, to have Clarke try her hardest to “be the good guy” and then end up “being the bad guy” due to unintended consequences. 

[firewindmill]

Nemo, my buddy. My guy. Please PLEASE tell me that “Voltron remake” is just me hallucinating or having nightmares. 😩 Please tell me people are not actually pulling this racist bs and even calling Shiro fxcking ‘Hachiko’.. I can’t...

I ACTUALLY HAVE THOUGHTS ON THIS AND TWEETED ABOUT IT IVE BEEN STEAMED ABOUT IT THAT ITS PUSHED ME TO SPEAK ABOUT IT ON MY DAMN RADIO PROGRAM HANG ON OH MY GOD. I was like..should i say this on this hell site…okay I’m gonna give you my 2 cents and more, from both my radio and art account where the salt leaks. 

I tweeted this earlier over here:

How do I say this…we should be thankful for the content that we didn’t get as kids NOW and fight for what we want NOW for future generations in the areas of ideal representation in media. It’s never going to be perfect in the beginning because it’s never been done before. Everyone has to crawl before they take their first baby step, walk and then run. It’s just how things work, or you put the work you wanna see in the world with your own original work. That’s what I’m seeing these days for queer representation in media, on TV or cartoons.There’s a lot of stuff big companies are not gonna pick up on and many people want different things but you need to celebrate those baby steps and encourage more work CONSTRUCTIVELY to take things places it hasn’t been before.Also put your money where your mouth is. And don’t attack queer people while playing fake progressive and using outdated queer tropes that harmed our communities or weaponizing other tropes without understanding what they actually mean when applied.

Then after hearing more about what the fucking reboot was doing, I had this to say this over here and its sad because Lance isn’t even my top favorite character, I love him now but he isn’t my favorite compared to Pidge, Hunk, Keith and Shiro.

Lmao can unaffected latinx folks not speak over latinx folks that are affected AND offended by renaming L*nce to Le*ndro.Y'all not get the nuance and history of getting easy to pronounce names for English speakers vs a “Spanish” sounding name. When my mom was a kid, her brothers all had different but traditionally Hispanic names as it would go, my uncles Octavio, Raul, Jesse, Gerardo.Teachers would mispronounce Raul as “Roll” “Rall” & kids would call my uncle Octavio “oco the taco man”My mom didn’t wanna fuck w that. So when she had my sister and I, she named me after my(her) godmother Sara (this is now my deadname because I’m queer) and named my sister Elizabeth(she prefers Lizard now) because she didn’t want her kids to go through that shit. So uh, its racist to be searching for a more “Spanish” sounding name for our identities to be exploited for whites to jerk off to cause it’s “exotic” and “different”. Don’t talk to me if you disagree and stay in your lane. I could never stand w that bigoted side of fandom, hesitated to call it what it is but bigotry bleeds into everything we do, even in fandom spaces & I will not associate with anyone who’s “okay” with it.AU’s are one thing.Reboots consisting of bigoted entitlement is another.

You’re not hallucinating and quite frankly, I’d be keeping receipts on this since their racism is out in the open publicly and keep it up to hold them accountable if they’re gonna change and serve as a reminder of the monsters they once were. But I’m not fucking surprised considering the atrocious way they’ve treated other fans, treated their own fellow shippers, treated US, many that are in the groups that identify with Shiro one way or another whether we’re queer, disabled, Asian, mentally ill or a mix of 2, 3 or all of these aspects, the REAL, tangible and quite frankly the most progressive I’ve seen in any form of media because it’s INTERSECTIONAL and not based on disgusting tokenism. Some folks are saying oh I wanted to give it a chance, give it the benefit of the doubt…let me tell you something that hasn’t steered me wrong.

Never give the benefit of the doubt. People will tell you what they want you to know, and what these people want us to know is that they want their old fashioned stereotypes where queer people are predators, poc are their stereotypes, are the same, and will exploit identities like the latest jerk off material for their fake woke points. I’ve thought to myself…Nemo…you shouldn’t be using academic language on prejudice and oppression in fandom spaces…these are fictional and that’s real life.

But now I’m gonna say what I’ve held to myself for literally since the  beginning of the discourse because I was here when Voltron was being talked about in articles, BEFORE it launched on Netflix

Antis in fandom are experiencing extreme cognitive dissonance and fragility that is commonly seen in privileged groups. They say one thing but disagree with the idea when its presented to them in an actual realistic manner and what they’ve done, and always have done is reacted in a series of defensive moves when they’re challenged on their bigotry and supremacy, internalized or otherwise, then self-destruct as they’re doing now, showing the faces that many of us have already known or seen. Some are just realizing it now but its better now then never seeing or acknowledging it. Contrary to popular belief, sometimes fake liberalism is just as if not more harmful than straight up alt-right people being open about it because the former sneaks up on you and kills you if you let it, and that’s coming from someone who’s lived in the culture of the passive aggressive midwest of the United States all my life. 

I’m so sorry this got so fucking long but mark my words, I’ll never accept any form of bigotry in my personal online spaces, and will be muting the tag and unfollow/block anyone i’m following as I see fit because I cannot and will not stand by that behavior.

[viralhottopics]

The Internet Made Fake News a ThingThen Made It Nothing

Ascourge is killing peoples minds, according to Apple CEO Tim Cook, and the world needs a massive campaign to stop it. Across the nation, people lament its rise, and the threat it poses to America.Opioids? ISIS? Nope. “Fake news.” Even homicidal dictators agree things have gotten out of control. “Were living in a fake news era, as you know,” Syrian president Bashar al-Assad said,dismissing an Amnesty International report that his government hanged as many as13,000 prisoners.

Factual falsehoods and straight-up lies started when the first first caveman claimed that, yes, that handprint on the wall is mine, and it is huge. Fast-forward a few millennia, and you’ll find hoaxes circulating online since Usenet was how people mainly communicated online. But “fake news” as anepithet, if not an accurate description of a story about, say, a child sex ring at a pizza joint, is something newa seemingly straightforward concept that has shattered into a kaleidoscope of easily manipulated meanings.

But how did the discourse around this so quickly spiralfrom “Pope Francis Shocks the World, Endorses Donald Trump” (he didn’t) to Donald Trump shouting “fake news” at a CNN reporter during a press conference before his inauguration and incessantly tweeting about it after his inauguration? The origin story of “fake news” reflects the dizzying speed at which semantic shifts occur in the social media era. But it reveals farmore: What happens to factuality itself as algorithms replace humans, Facebook supplants traditional media, and the president declares war on the press. That perfect storm has made “fake news” as unstuck from factand as unstoppableas any viral hoax. Watching the meaning of “fake news” evolve shows just how easily even facts about facts can slip away.

1 – Fake Trends – May 9, 2016

On May 9, 2016, at 9:10 AM, Gizmodo publishes a story by Michael Nuez: “Former Facebook Workers: We Routinely Suppressed Conservative News.” Nuez reports that editors in charge of Facebooks trending section would prevent conservative-friendly stories from showing up.

Backlash is swift. Talk, talk, talk on cable shows. Third-ranking Republican Senator John Thune calls on Facebook to investigate. Three days later, Zuckerberg says the company “found no evidence that this report is true.” Zuckerberg then hosts a listening session with conservative thinkers at Facebook headquarters. (In an email, Facebook tells WIRED it stands by its investigation into bias and pointed to its ongoing efforts to tweak Trending.)

On August 24, John Herrmans “Inside Facebooks (Totally Insane, Unintentionally Gigantic, Hyperpartisan) Political-Media Machine” runs in the New York Times Magazine. Herrman details the platforms plague of ideologically-themed pages that become a primary vector for sensationalized “news” and worse, though he doesn’t use the phrase “fake news.” Two days later, Facebook announces its automating Trending Topics, reportedly firing the sections editorial team and replacing them with engineers.

Three days pass, and a story falsely claiming Fox News fired anchor Megyn Kelly for supporting Hillary Clinton surges on Trending Topics. Facebook apologizes. The story, it turns out, originated on endingthefed.com, a site devoted to right-wing takes, conspiracy theories, and outright falsehoods. “We determined it was a hoax and it is no longer being shown in Trending,” Justin Osofsky, vice president of global operations at Facebook, says at the time. “Were working to make our detection of hoax and satirical stories quicker and more accurate.” For the bots, it seems, the facts were a slippery concept.

Eventually algorithms and computers are going to get smart enough to do our jobs, Adam Schrader, a former trending curator, says now. But I dont think that this robot was ready yet.

On September 9, Facebook removes a trending story that claims bombs felled the Twin Towers.

2 – Fake News Becomes Real – October 12, 2016

On October 12, the Washington Post publishes the results of its own experiment. “Facebook has repeatedly trended fake news since firing its human editors,” the story reports. Monitoring four users’ accounts from August 31 to September 22, five “indisputably fake” and three “profoundly inaccurate” stories trended, the Post found.

Other media outlets pick up the newspaper’s story, from Fortune”Facebook Still Has a Fake News Problem”to Vanity Fair: “Facebook Is Still Grappling with Its Fake-News Problem”.

On October 20, Buzzfeed, which had regularly reported on fake news for years, unveils the results of its investigation: “Hyperpartisan Facebook Pages Are Publishing False And Misleading Information At An Alarming Rate.” Buzzfeed’s extensive analysis finds that hyperpartisan Facebook pages most likely to post inaccurate stories received far more shares, likes, and comments than mainstream news pages. The investigation describes stories and sites as “fake news,” which Buzzfeed media editor Craig Silverman describes as 100 percent-false stories knowingly created for financial gain.

Despite Buzzfeed’s alarming statistics, “fake news” as a term might have faded away. “The proliferation of fake news links on Facebook, in other words, is probably a problem that will be forgotten before it is fixedand that might have peaked just as Americans chose their next president,” Herrman writes in the New York Times on Election Day. Or not.

3 – Trump Rises – November 9, 2016

By the afternoon of November 9, Max Read of New York has come up with an answer to why the media missed the biggest story of the year. “The most obvious way in which Facebook enabled a Trump victory has been its inability (or refusal) to address the problem of hoax or fake news,” he writes in a story,”Donald Trump Won Because of Facebook.”

Related Video

Inside the Fake News Factory of Macedonia

Read now says that he meant more to critique technologys influence on politics, less to contribute to the idea of fake news as “the great journalistic moral panic of late-2016 early-2017.”

“I think that ball got carried down the field further than I would have wanted it to, or that I would have carried it myself,” he says.

But as Reads story and other, similar critiques spread, “fake news” slotted perfectly into the dominant narrative emerging in the aftermath of the election identifying a schism between coastal elites and the white working-class so vast that mainstream journalists were blind to Trump’s surging support. Journalists chastened by election results they didn’t anticipate could point to conspiracy theories and falsehoods on social mediawhere 62 percent of Americans get news, according to Pew Research Centeras further evidence of this American divide.

Meanwhile, speaking at a tech conference three days after the election, Zuckerberg disputes that Facebook-propagated fake news was a serious problem. Ive seen some of the stories theyre talking about around this election, he says. “I think the idea that fake news on Facebook, of which its a very small amount of the content, influenced the election in any way, I think is a pretty crazy idea.”

Zuck’s soundbite (pretty crazy!) riles critics and catalyzes the ideological cleaving of “fake news”: Liberals embrace it as an existential threat to democracy while conservatives use it as a joke to tweak liberals looking to blame Clinton’s loss on anything other than their own shortcomings. “Anger and humor are probably the two big reasons why it spread,” Jeff Hemsley, a Syracuse University professor who studies social media, says of the term. “I think people were angry about the idea that Facebook could have influenced the election.”

Then “fake news” erupts with violence into the real world. On December 4, a man inspired by false stories about a non-existent Hillary Clinton-affiliated child-sex ring, walks into a Washington pizzeria at the center of the conspiracy theory and opens fire. (No one is hurt.) Sheryl Gay Stolberg, a reporter for the New York Times, tweets, “The consequence of fake news: Real bullets.” And so “fake news” evolves from a threat to democratic norms into a menace to public safety.

4 – Presidential Fake-Out – Dec. 10, 2017

A week later, president-elect Donald Trump tweets: Reports by @CNN that I will be working on The Apprentice during my Presidency, even part time, are ridiculous & untrue, he writes. FAKE NEWS! (CNN cited NBC and Trump sources in reporting Trumps role with the show.)

With the presidency comes great power, and with that one tweet, Trump makes “fake news” his own. “Now fake news has a completely different meaning. Now anything that Trump doesnt like can be fake news,” Hemsley says.

Related Video

Heres How Fake News Works (and How the Internet Can Stop It)

Sensing the term’s co-optable potential, Washington Post media columnist Margaret Sullivan on January 8 warns fellow journalists: “Its time to retire the tainted term ‘fake news.’”

“Though the term hasnt been around long, its meaning already is lost,” she writes.

On January 10, Buzzfeed publishes an unverified dossier detailing allegedly deep ties between Trump and Russia. FAKE NEWS – A TOTAL POLITICAL WITCH HUNT! Trump tweets in response (all caps his own).

The next day Trump refuses to take a question from Jim Acosta of CNN, which first reported the dossiers existence, though it didn’t report the specific contents. The number of searches for “fake news” on Google reaches its zenith when Trumps press conference goes viral: “Don’t be rude. No, I’m not going to give you a question,” Trump tells Acosta. “You are fake news.” (He then takes a question from a Breitbart reporter.)

After the Inauguration, Trump and his staffers dismiss photos showing bigger crowds at Obama’s swearing-in, and Trump advisor Kellyanne Conway inaugurates “alternative facts.” In a later series of tweets, Trump berates news organizations for failing to predict his victory. “Any negative polls are fake news, just like the CNN, ABC, NBC polls in the election,” Trump tweets on February 6.

The president’s slings continue, and the term goes global. The campaign for Emmanuel Macron, a leading candidate in Frances April presidential election, preemptively blames Russia for influencing the outcome through its use of fausse nouvelle.

On February 16, the president stages a press conference that CNN’s Jake Tapper calls “unhinged.” Of reports of aides’ contact with Russia, Trump says, “The leaks are absolutely real, the news is fake.” The next day, he raises the stakes again: “The FAKE NEWS media (failing @nytimes, @NBCNews, @ABC, @CBS, @CNN) is not my enemy, it is the enemy of the American People!”

On Monday, Trump lambasts the media for calling out his reference to a non-existent incident in Sweden: “Give the public a break – The FAKE NEWS media is trying to say that large scale immigration in Sweden is working out just beautifully. NOT!” (All caps his.) Since then, he’s been uncharacteristically quiet, at least until Friday.

“I want you all to know that we are fighting the fake news. It’s fake, phony, fake,” Trump says at the Conservative Political Action Conference, to cheers. “A few days ago I called the fake news ‘the enemy of the people,’ and they are.”

And so the cries of “fake news” echo still. Like its forebear “political correctness,” the protean meanings of “fake news” have made the term meaningless. It’s a rallying cry to some, a joke to others. It’s both and neither. It was born from a media frenzy bent on describing a murky reality, and it died by that, too. Mostly, it’s become a signifier of cynicism, a term feeding a public sense that maybe nothing is believable, or worth believing, anymore.

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from The Internet Made Fake News a ThingThen Made It Nothing