According to a new examination from the Washington Post, Republican candidates
this year are sharing more misinformation on social media than ever. Now of course, we,
we haven't had social media for a whole lot of elections here in the United States, right? So
when we say more misinformation than ever really talking about, you know, the last like 16 years,
probably not even that long, maybe 14 years, because I don't think they were sharing stuff
on Myspace, but either way in, misinformation of course is flowing. And as the report says,
almost all of it's coming from Republicans. In the year 2020 from January to July of 2020,
when Republican congressional candidates shared links to news sources, 8% came from sites rated
as unreliable on average each day. For Democratic candidates, the daily average was less than 1%.
Now that was 2020. That's how bad it was back then, right? 8% of what Republicans
were sharing was fake, less than 1% of what Democrats were sharing was fake.
Now, fast forward two years, from January to July of 2022, on average each day 36%
of news that Republican candidates shared came from unreliable sites.
While that was true for only 2% of news shared by Democratic candidates each day.
So they went from 8% to 36%. The Democrats went from 1% to 2%.
36% of what Republican candidates are sharing on social media every day is from an unreliable news
source and I love how they, they put that, you know, nicer name on it. Unreliable. It's fake,
it's fraudulent. It's filled with lies. How about we call it that,
right? Can we just finally be honest and stop saying it's a mistruth or misinformation?
They're lying to you 80, well, not 80. I'm sorry. They're lying to you every day with
36% of the things that they share on their social media. That's what's happening. And when you break
it down by specific candidate, of course, things get a little worse. Take for example, Sarah Palin,
because this NewsGuard is who the Washington Post used to go through and collab,
collect this information. NewsGuard found that with regard to Sarah Palin, not only is
she sharing more fake news than anybody else, so Sarah Palin is officially the queen of fake news,
but 99% of the articles that she shares on social media are fake, 99%. Almost a perfect score that
that moron from Alaska is sharing on social media every single day. It's almost all fake.
So yes, Sarah Palin is the queen of fake news.
So the big question of course, that this study didn't get into is, why?
Why do Republicans have to resort to lies and fake news and misinformation in order to get ahead in
their campaigns? And I think maybe, I'm hoping, I don't want to give them the benefit of the doubt
because they're not as good as they once were obviously, but I, maybe the Washington Post thinks
that everybody already knows why Republicans do this. And in case you don't know, let me spell
it out for you very clearly. Republicans run on lies because they can't run on issues because
they have no policy platforms that benefit anybody other than wealthy people. Their policy platform
is attack the culture wars and cut taxes. That's it. That's all they got. So of course they have to
spread fake news. Of course they have to lie to their constituents, because if they told
them what they were really up to, nobody in this country would ever vote for a Republican again.