No, this is not an Onion article. This is real life.
Paul Horner, 38, has been writing completely made-up news on his “satire” site abcnews.com.co (which even uses a logo designed to mimic the real ABC News logo) for year. But he is just now realizing the damage fake news disguised as real news can do.
“Honestly, people are definitely dumber. They just keep passing stuff around. Nobody fact-checks anything anymore — I mean, that’s how Trump got elected,” Horner told the Washington Post in an interview published Thursday. “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.