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Because I teach a course on the history of conservatism, I get a lot of requests from friends to help me make sense of the bizarre emails they get from their conservative uncles or brothers or [insert relationship here]. Here's the latest doozy someone sent me. 
It took exactly 2 seconds to find this excellent Snopes piece debunking this. It first circulated in 2000 about the Bush/Gore election, but was updated for 2016. Timeless truths never age, I guess? snopes.com/fact-check/the…
This got me thinking about the prevalence of conspiracy theories today. When you survey Reddit, Facebook, Twitter, etc. you encounter a huge subculture of folks imbibing, sharing, and contributing to conspiracy theories. But imagine if you could see what was happening in emails?
How many viral email chains are there out there? Who are the most effective distributors of these messages? Are conspiracy theories more readily taken up by folks when they come in an email from someone they know?
How does this sort according to age? Almost all of the conspiracy emails people send me have been forwarded by someone over 70 years old. Are these folks also on Reddit or Facebook or Twitter? Or is this a more old fashioned political culture based on IRL relationships?
The prevalence of these networks of older folks circulating fake news emails makes me think that our current "epistemological crisis" instigated by social media technology has very deep roots. The folks circulating these fake emails were educated in the 1950s and 60s.
So anyone who says "we used to care about the truth but now we're all just gullible fools willing to believe anything we see on a screen" is oversimplifying things. The credulity of these elderly email circulators is longstanding, and is not the fault of Facebook or Russia.
Here's an old thread on another one of these elderly email circulators. This time, the subject wasn't the death of democracy, it was an argument for why Hitler was one of the good guys, like Jesus.
And here's another thread on a terrifying conspiracy theory video that same woman circulated to her email list back in 2017.
