The US woke up on Friday to the news that Donald Trump was a full 20 percentage points ahead of Ted Cruz, his nearest rival, for the Republican nomination, and a good 16 percentage points higher than America’s top political analysts thought he would be.
Running on a platform of “making America great again”, his campaign has been noteworthy for Trump’s egregious widespread insults and total fabrications, on a gargantuan scale. The most recent of which was him claiming to have seen “thousands of Muslims” dancing in the streets of New Jersey after 9/11. No evidence exists of this, because it never happened.
Donald Trump has so far spent a mere $217,000 on broadcast advertising, compared to the eye-watering $28.9m spent by Jeb Bush, currently languishing at 3% of the poll compared with Trump’s 36%. Trump is allowing the evolved ecology of TV coverage and the new power of the social web do the work for him, live tweeting along the way.
When it is possible to remove all traces of a campaign claim which is completely untrue, and demonstrably so, by building verifiability into the algorithm, will social platforms and search engines go ahead and do it?
What he meant was, should reporters report something even if they know it to be false?
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