Photo credit: Alexandra Dao
During the 2016 general election campaign, a meme circulated on Twitter in which a giant fist used chains to manipulate unwitting Americans who had television sets for heads. It was not subtle. The text beneath read: “The people will believe what the media tells them they believe – George Orwell.” In fact, Orwell never wrote those words, nor do they sound like something he would have written. For one thing, “the media” did not enter common usage until after his death in 1950, and this stickler for correct prose would never have used the singular. For another, he had too much faith in ordinary people to portray them as gullible puppets. A report commissioned by the Senate Intelligence Committee later discerned that the phony quotation had been disseminated by the Internet Research Agency, Russia’s most prolific troll farm...