During the 2016 election campaign, the Internet Research Agency, a Russian troll farm, flooded social media with fake news stories designed to generate confusion, cynicism and division. One of the agency’s popular memes read: “The People Believe What the Media Tells Them They Believe: George Orwell.” The quotation was fabricated. Orwell never used the phrase the media, which did not enter common usage until after his death, and he would never have made such a simplistic claim. The irony of Russian propagandists putting words into Orwell’s mouth in order to hijack his prestige as a truth-teller
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