BuzzFeed reports the President is easily taken in by fake news:
President Donald Trump on Thursday posted to his official Facebook page a news report that erroneously claimed Kuwait had followed his recent immigration order by implementing a visa ban on several Muslim-majority nations.
The story from Jordanian outlet Al Bawaba claimed “Syrians, Iraqis, Iranians, Pakistanis and Afghans will not be able to obtain visit, tourism or trade Kuwaiti visas with the news coming one day after the US slapped its own restrictions on seven Muslim-majority countries.”
“Smart,” President Trump wrote in his Facebook post, which was subsequently shared more than 65,000 times. (The post was still live on Saturday afternoon).
However, the Kuwaiti Ministry of Foreign Affairs has since expressly denied the reports.
In a statement to state-run news outlet Kuwait News Agency, Assistant Foreign Minister for Consular Affairs Sami Al-Hamad said the ministry “categorically denies these claims and affirms that these reported nationalities…have big communities in Kuwait and enjoy full rights.”
This may just be a precursor of what’s to come: the bombardment of an American President, not with bombs, but with fake news, knowing he’s so credulous he’ll believe anything that accords with his world-view (also known as confirmation bias). There’s a couple of facets of interest here.
First, what will be fed to him? The motivation would be to lead him down paths that benefit those who generate and feed him the news. A key factor will be the half-life of effectivity for the average bit of fake news, which will dictate the goals that may be accomplished by leading him astray. Additionally, this “smart guy” may actually figure it out and thus dampen the value of this approach to manipulating him. It sounds like quite the dance.
The second facet is, of course, who will be motivating the dance. The Russians are a given, but more interesting is that the President’s own staff has admitted that the best way to communicate with the President is not in face-to-face meetings, but via TV. If the President chooses a path with which his staff disagrees, would they use fake news, spread to channels they know he favors, in order to manipulate him down the paths they prefer?
I sense more than one scientific study unfolding in the minds of the science community even as I type.
