Democrat presidential candidate Beto O’Rourke’s campaign would like to stop all fake news … except for the disinformation that Beto himself brings to the table.
The campaign got angry after a rumor was spread on the internet that the Odessa shooter supported O’Rourke Campaign manager Jen O’Malley Dillon (a 2012 deputy campaign manager for President Barack Obama) tweeted that the campaign was “entirely helpless to stop misinformation.” She called on “tech companies who allow right wing operatives to spread misinformation” to do something about it.
The Washington Post reported that the rumor started, not with a bot or a foreign interference, but with an actual person who tweeted that the Odessa shooter had a Beto O’Rourke sticker on the back of his car. This information has not been verified, but it was widely circulated.
People make mistakes, but that’s not good enough for the candidate. Beto is no stranger to this phenomenon. Even the most liberal of fact-checkers have found him guilty of misinformation. Politifact rated his claim that “zero terrorists” have been connected to the Mexican-American border “false.” The same website has stated that at least five of O’Rourke’s statements are “mostly false.”
The Post gave O’Rourke its “Four Pinocchios” when the then-challenger to Senator Ted Cruz’s seat claimed that he did not leave the scene of his DWI in 1998. The crime report stated, “The driver attempted to leave the accident but was stopped by the reporter.”
Now, during the outcry over this rumor, Dillon writes that she holds tech companies such as Google, Facebook, and Twitter responsible for the “misinformation” being spread by “right wing operatives.”
She asked tech companies, “What are you going to do about it?”
But will big tech companies do something about O’Rourke’s misinformation?
