This is what it's like to read fake news for two weeks

So I became @HighCastlePhil. I decided I’d take Flynn Jr.’s tailored feed (944 accounts; a couple of dozen users with private accounts declined my request) and wear it myself for a while. I picked my Twitter handle in honor of Philip K. Dick, who wrote the ultimate alt-reality novel “The Man in the High Castle,” about a world in which the Nazis won the war. I didn’t tweet but watched and tried to imagine what was going through the mind of the man who sees the world through faux-tinted glasses. I noted that when Flynn Jr. opened his account several years ago, he evinced a conventionally conservative outlook, following Rush Limbaugh and the Heritage Foundation. He enjoyed the sports talk personality Colin Cowherd and wasn’t above checking out what @WhiteHouse had to say. Over time, though, he began collecting users who associated themselves almost exclusively with Donald Trump, alt-right white nationalism, or both. Many of them had similar handles: “Deplorable Aaron,” “Deplorable Vet,” “Johnny Deplorable.” As a diagnostic system it wasn’t perfect; I couldn’t replicate a dummy Facebook account, where the most mendacious garbage tends to mushroom. Still, Flynn Jr. used the medium regularly, and followed enough people to yield a good sample size for my experiment.

I began lingering on Phil Dick’s Twitter feed and kept at it over the course of a couple weeks. At the same time I scaled back on the information I gathered from mainstream outlets or my own social media feeds. If there is such a thing as a parallel information universe I had at least one foot planted firmly in it. One thing I learned is that a lot of people have low tolerance for serious articles published in respectable publications. So I thought it best to present my findings in the form of a clickbait listicle. Without further ado, the five craziest things you’ll learn when all you read is fake news.