At first blush, a headline Reba McEntire posted to her Instagram account looked like a salacious tidbit from a gossip magazine.
The headline claimed that McEntire, who performed “The Star-Spangled Banner” at the Super Bowl last month, called Taylor Swift an “entitled brat” for “laughing and drinking” during the performance. After McEntire called out the headline to her 2.6 million Instagram followers and praised Swift, several news outlets published stories saying McEntire had used her post to quash so-called rumors of a feud.
In her post, McEntire offered some good advice: “Please don’t believe everything you see on the Internet.”
The headline was from a satire account on Facebook created by self-proclaimed professional troll Christopher Blair.
He said she took it too seriously.
“I have to believe it was just a knee-jerk reaction or something. She figured it was horrible, and she reacted,” Blair said of McEntire’s post. “On today’s internet, you have to be better than that.”
A representative for McEntire declined to comment.
Blair runs some of the most successful satire pages on the internet meant to target conservatives who don’t bother to click beyond his fictional and farcical headlines. His main Facebook account, America’s Last Line of Defense, is part of a network of parody accounts including the one called America Loves Liberty, on which he published the McEntire article.
Those pages link back to his satire news website, The Dunning-Kruger Times, which hosts all manner of fake, newsy articles, almost all of them under the byline “Flagg Eagleton — Patriot.” On his pages, accounts and website, Blair cautions readers that “nothing on this page is real.”
Although some might find Blair’s methods questionable, he stays within the bounds of Facebook’s rules by disclosing at the top of the page that nothing he writes is real — though that does little to dissuade many people from taking his articles seriously.
The…
Read the full article here
