A screenshot of National Report's masthead.
"There's a lot to be learned on Facebook by these kinds of things," Montgomery said. "It's something that gets out of hand. Facebook is a great place for friendships and being social, but when it comes down to it, a news source it is not."'You write something that will get a response from racists or bigots, these guys that are fearing everything — you write something to pull 'em out of the woodwork and sometimes they come running.'
The Facebook page for "Fappy the Anti-Masturbation Dolphin," a character created by Paul Horner.
Horner joined National Report as a contributor about a year ago, and says he first experimented with more straightforward mockery in the style of The Daily Show and the Onion, but that he failed to attract many readers, which is how he gets paid. After the site switched to conservative trolling, Horner said, the page views soared. In a Reddit AMA in October, Horner boasted of earning $30,000 in ad revenue from Google over the past three months."We found that by placing Ted Cruz and Sarah Palin at the top of the site and just really trying to do this Fox News-type website on steroids, that's when things really exploded," he told VICE News.'I'd like to think that if you're posting things enough times that people know aren't real, that you personally begin to lose credibility.'
Report: Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg Has Converted To Islam — National Report (@TNROnline)November 21, 2014
Tweets from the National Report about Facebook."I haven't seen anything that really convinces me liberals or conservatives are more effective at spreading their message," Munson said. "It's organic. It's individual choices about what to post."Munson said his research suggests that ideological sequestration isn't any worse online than it is in other media. Even though nearly every media outlet in the world is now at our fingertips, most people stick with a few sites they like or trust."When you look at what people read, studies I've done and others have done, it turns out they do use the internet to access ideologically agreeable news," Munson said. "But they do the same thing with TV and print media. It's only a little bit worse. It's not as bad as people predicted."But Facebook still holds at least the opportunity for exposure to different political points of view. According to a joint 2013 study by researchers at Georgia Tech and the University of Minnesota, 40 percent of the US adult population reports that their friends post political content on social network sites, and 15 percent of content that users share on Facebook is political.A National Report hoax about a plan by President Obama to auction off marijuana seized by law enforcement.Man Arrested for Anti-Obama Facebook Post — National Report (@TNROnline)November 10, 2014
A screenshot of a National Report story by Paul Horner in which the author describes himself as Dennis Rodman's agent.