Paul Horner

Paul Horner is a contributor to fake news websites.

Lead writer for National Report

He was lead writer of the fake-news website National Report since the site's launch^[1][2] One of his widest-spread fake stories was a piece claiming that artist Banksy had been arrested and his identity revealed as Paul Horner, which Horner posted in 2013 and was re-circulated in 2014.^[3][4]

Departure and launch of News Examiner

Horner left National Report in 2014, launched News Examiner at the start of 2015 and also started numerous websites including cnn.com.de, cbsnews.com.co and nbc.com.co to post fake news articles,^[5] as well as ABCnews.com.co.^[6] In 2015 he wrote a fake story that Yelp was suing South Park that received wide circulation,^[7] as did another story that a man named "Paul Horner" had undergone the world's first head transplant.^[8]

By 2015 he had written several fake stories about DeQuincy, Louisiana, which said that the town had been under attack from gay zombies, had legalized polygamy, and had banned twerking, discussing the color of any dress (in response to the viral story about the dress), and Koreans; he told a local news station that he originally targeted it because "my friend Brandon Adams said there is like 4,000 people that live there, and all they do is drink Old Milwaukee's Best and beat their wives" and that he kept targeting it because he had received death and castration threats in response to his first story.^[9] One of his stories about DeQuincy, and one that he says is one of his favorites; was about a man who stopped a robbery in a diner by quoting Pulp Fiction; ^[10] the story was posted on the Miramax website.^[11]

2016 U.S. presidential election

His stories had an "enormous impact" on the 2016 U.S. presidential election according to CBS News;^[12] they consistently appeared in Google's top news search results, were shared widely on Facebook, and were taken seriously and shared by third parties such as Trump presidential campaign manager Corey Lewandowski, Eric Trump, ABC News, and the Fox News Channel.^[13][14][15] In a November 2016 interview with The Washington Post, Horner, who said he earns $10,000 per month from the stories, expressed regret, stating:

I thought they'd fact-check it, and it'd make them look worse. I mean that's how this always works: Someone posts something I write, then they find out it's false, then they look like idiots. But Trump supporters—they just keep running with it! They never fact-check anything! Now he's in the White House. Looking back, instead of hurting the campaign, I think I helped it. And that feels [bad].^[16][17][18]

In stories about the impact of fake news on the election, he was widely quoted, as follows:

Honestly, people are definitely dumber. They just keep passing stuff around. Nobody fact-checks anything anymore—I mean, that’s how Trump got elected. He just said whatever he wanted, and people believed everything, and when the things he said turned out not to be true, people didn’t care because they’d already accepted it. It’s real scary. I’ve never seen anything like it.”^{[16][19][20][21]}

In a follow-up interview with Rolling Stone, Horner revealed that The Washington Post profile piece on him spurred greatly increased interest with over 60 interview requests from media including ABC News, CBS News, and Inside Edition.^[10][22] Horner explained that his writing style was such that articles appeared legitimate at the top and became increasingly couched in absurdity as the reader progressed: "Most of my stuff, starts off, the first paragraph is super legit, the title is super legit, the picture is super legit, but then the story just gets more and more ridiculous and it becomes obvious that none of it is true."^[10] Horner told Rolling Stone that he always placed his name as a fictional character in his fake articles.^[10] He said he supported efforts to decrease fake news websites.^[10]

References