Oh, the things people say—especially politicians. Back in 1998, Trump told People he would run as a Republican, if he ever ran at all, because Republicans are the dumbest voters in the country and would eat up any lies he fed them. His running mate Mike Pence declared that legalizing post-rape abortions would lead to an epidemic of rape claims. Billy Graham’s little boy Franklin warned about the dread prospect of death camps for Christians a few years down the road unless Trump becomes president. And speaking of presidents, the French one decided to bring back the guillotine for convicted terrorists.
None of these reports is true. The originating webpages describe themselves as satirical, though they are markedly heavy-handed and unfunny, and the disclaimers are usually buried in a minefield of clickable ad-links, pop-ups, and flashing sidebars. Worse, vast hordes of people now see such stories first as shares on social media, in the form of viral memes or links to the “satirical” article—and many readers, judging by the comments, do not take in much beyond the deceptive and outrage-generating headline. The border between satire and irresponsible factoid-manufacture becomes fuzzier and fuzzier—especially where the factoid feeds into a reader’s confirmation bias. The “satire” will inevitably be disseminated as truth by some readers, no matter how outrageous, and no matter how often it is debunked. As web folklorist David Emery puts it:
Satire is only effective if people recognize it as such…and therein lies a major pitfall of publishing fake news on the Internet. Users tend to skim texts instead of reading them, missing important clues and disclaimers. The mechanics of social sharing obscure the origin and aim of viral content, increasing the likelihood that fiction will be mistaken for, or purposely misrepresented as, fact.
Then there are the sites that do not put on even a thin pretence of satire—fake news sites set up to capture clicks, baiting their traps with shock, schlock, and shameless invention. There’s this guy, see, who karmically got his penis shredded by an anti-rape device; and this young couple who performed DIY surgery to give their baby Spock ears, and had their kid taken away; and this shoplifting chick at Walmart who blew up her own vagina with stolen fireworks, or maybe with stolen Pillsbury cookie dough. Or the somewhat luckier chick with a load of groceries stuffed up her hoo-ha, who got busted but not blown up:
They asked me to come do a full cavity search on a recently arrested shoplifter, which is very unusual. They told me that they thought she was holding groceries in her vagina, and I literally laughed out loud. They told me about the oranges and not feeling anything during the pat down, so I took her in the back and sure enough, we found nearly $100 worth of groceries inside of her vagina. A dozen eggs, bread, milk, a few more oranges, as well as a full porterhouse and a rack of bacon were in there, plus a lot more. I was shocked.
Okay, so that’s actually pretty funny, though only an idiot would find it credible. But many of these new internet/urban legends are not quite so transparent.
The range of stories is huge, breathing new life into urban legends, disseminating misinformation, disinformation, rumour, and scandal, as if News of the World had metastasized on a global scale. Some of the stories, however, are not funny at all—hoax tales of ISIS terrorist attacks, as if we weren’t having more than enough of the real thing already; scandalous stories designed, not just to grab clicks, but to tempt the unwary into donating to fake charities, or opening themselves up to malware and cyberattack. There are the maliciously mischievous tales that feed on social tensions—for example, freezers full of beheaded white women with BLM carved into their foreheads, black schoolchildren massacred for wanting to know more about black history, deadbeat dads massacred by vengeful ex-wives. [Those last two stories, incidentally, use exactly the same picture and much of the same text; offensiveness is ramped up by naming one of the bloodthirsty ex-wives after murdered transwoman Kiesha Jenkins.]
Now, the internet is a wonderful thing—the cat pictures alone would be enough to justify its existence. But it seems to me that the noise level is steadily rising, that the online proportion of lies, propaganda, pseudoinformation, mischief, and sheer evil is on an upward trend. So why does it matter if some site is wrong on the internet? Well, truth matters. It just does. But how can we tell the difference, when we’re barraged us daily with both truth and lies, and the facts sometimes sound as outrageous as the fictions? How is a pack of Pillsbury dough exploding in a shoplifter’s vagina any more incredible than sourdough bread made with vaginal yeast? Why should fabricated stupidities attributed to politicians be recognizable as satire, but not a petition to nominate Andrew Wakefield for a Nobel Peace Prize, which sounds like satire but isn’t? I bet there are very few of us who have never shared a satire or a hoax on Facebook, under the impression it was the real McCoy.
I’ve been burned a few times; now I try to pause before hitting Like or Share on some entertaining but slightly suspect item, especially if I’d quite like it to be true—read the article, google the keywords, check out the sites that come up. Fortunately, the internet also provides us with resources like good old Snopes and rbutr.com, plus lists of satirical websites and fake/hoax news sites. And then I do my best not to get too pissed off by the dishonesty, cynicism, and greed of the internet fabulists.
But now, I’m afraid you’ll have to excuse me—there’s a flying saucer emerging from the sinkhole that just opened up beside my house, and I think I see Elvis at the controls.
