Does this story represent its own alleged facts honestly?
In an episode of the cult sci-fi hit Firefly, the crew of the ship Serenity spends time at a space bazaar for a little R&R. Simon and Kaylee pass by a carnival barker, who lures them into his tent with the following pitch:
BARKER: Forget what you think you know. Forget what your mother told you when she tucked you in at night, forget the lies of our oppressive, cabalistic Allied governments! Behind this curtain is the very secret they do not want you to see — the most astounding scientific find in the history of humanity. Proof! Of Alien life. That’s right, go ahead and laugh, sir, but what you see inside this room will change your life forever! It will haunt your dreams and harrow — YES — your very soul.
But Simon, the doctor, is skeptical. After they’ve paid to enter the tent, we see this exchange:
SIMON: Yep. It’s a cow fetus.
KAYLEE: Guess so… Does seem to have an awful lot of limbs…But cow? How do you figure?
SIMON: It’s upside down.
The relationship between the sideshow barker’s pitch and what Simon and Kaylee actually find inside is a lot like that between the headlines you see circulating on social media and the actual content the headlines link to. Just like Simon and Kaylee, you enter the tent hoping to see something impressive, only to realize you’re now out twelve bits.
The similarity is not a coincidence. The business model of modern “clickbait” functions in about the same way as circus sideshows. Both make sensationalistic claims to motivate the curious to investigate further. Both get paid regardless of whether the curious are satisfied, especially since both are fly-by-night. What you find inside may be a curiosity, but is probably also manipulated like that upside-down cow fetus to bear only a passing similarity to the pitch.
On the Internet, there’s not so much shame in opening that clickbait post in the first place. But shame on you if you believe it and share it without running the sniff test first.
The main difference is that while you pay to get into the tent, advertisers pay clickbait hosts if you click on the link. You still end up feeling like a fool, though (and have to contend with the pop-up boxes and the collages of garish ads).
But you know what they say about being fooled twice. On the Internet, there’s not so much shame in opening that clickbait post in the first place. But shame on you if you believe it and share it without running the sniff test first. My earlier posts were aimed more at detecting outright fabrication. The fourth question is more applicable to stories that are based on some kernel of truth, but which fertilize that kernel with exaggeration and speculative fantasy: Does this story represent its own alleged facts honestly?
Let’s visit a little space bazaar called BuzzfeedUSA.com. Mind you, this is not to be confused with Buzzfeed.com, the popular source of viral social media content. (BuzzfeedUSA’s readers haven’t figured this out.) Passing through as recently as December 1st, 2016, we hear a barker yell at us “Former Top CIA Agent Drops BOMB: Obama is a Muslim Agent with Brotherhood Ties to Take Down USA.” Perhaps we don’t much like Obama, so this piques our interest. We decide to see what lies behind the curtain.
We are greeted with a picture of a woman (presumably the CIA agent) paired off against Obama in some kind of ethnic garb. We scroll down and are first met with advertising pictures portraying women in various states of undress, and gross-out pictures of punctured human skin. Having made it past that (and having closed several obtrusive pop-up ads), we get to the text we were hoping for. But it looks like this text has just been copied from another clickbait site, TopRightNews.com, so let’s go there instead.
When we get to TopRightNews.com, we’re met with the same sexy gross-out ads, though this time only the CIA agent is portrayed, not Obama in the cap. But we notice that this BOMB is also now at least over a year old, since the TopRightNews.com story was from November 9th . . . 2015 (which BuzzfeedUSA didn’t mention). But wait, there’s more! When TopRightNews.com begins to substantiate its headline, it gets around to quoting from a from a third source, WND.com. So let’s go there instead.
Now we start to wonder just how long of a fuse this BOMB had, since the WND story is now from August 28 . . . 2014! (The WND story itself is based on an interview conducted on August 13th, 2014.) Leaving that aside, we get to the money quote that should substantiate the headline’s promise:
As she told WND earlier this month, Lopez believed the Muslim Brotherhood has thoroughly infiltrated the Obama administration and other branches of the federal government.
She also came to the conclusion Obama had essentially the same goals in the Mideast as the late Osama bin Laden: “to remove American power and influence, including military forces, from Islamic lands.”
This is the upside down cow. There’s quite a difference between being a Muslim agent with ties to the Islamic Brotherhood, and being the leader of a government which has (allegedly) been infiltrated by Muslim agents. That’s a big difference even if it’s true that Obama has the goal of reducing the role of American power in the Mideast. For starters, the phrase “Muslim agent” suggests that you are actually an adherent to the religion of Islam, but I don’t have to explain why being the leader of a government infiltrated by members of a religion doesn’t make you a member yourself — let alone a secret agent of that religion.
Of course this upside down cow trick works because many people have already decided that Obama is a Muslim on other (Birther) grounds. I’ll state for the record that even though I am no fan of Mr. Obama, I think he was born in Hawaii and now self-identifies as a Christian, and I have never seen serious evidence that contradicts this. But even if I were open to challenging that, these articles offer no evidence to warrant changing my mind.
Notice that in criticizing BuzzfeedUSA and TopRightNews.com, I’m not even challenging their contention that Obama has foreign policy objectives that are aligned with Osama bin Laden. Even if he does, why would you trust someone who has basically already defrauded you? The mere fact that the original post presented a story as if it were breaking news, even though the story was over two years old, should be cause enough for closing the site and never visiting again. But the fact that the article doesn’t support its own sensationalistic headline with its own alleged details should give us much less confidence that the author is even getting the details right in the first place.
And people share this on social media! You can search by the title of the piece on Facebook just to see how many people among your friends have shared it, and how many non-friends have shared it publicly.
In doing that search on Facebook, you also notice that BuzzfeedUSA is not the only clickbait site in on the racket of spreading the old TopRightNews (and the older WND) story as if they are breaking news. Someone called FreedomDaily.com is in on it too. Also CurrentTopNews.com. And Observatorial.com. And I’ll stop there, though I could probably keep going.
The fact that the article doesn’t support its own sensationalistic headline with its own alleged details should give us much less confidence that the author is even getting the details right in the first place.
Here’s the next scary fact. The BuzzfeedUSA story isn’t one of the notorious “fake news” stories that has been making news lately. I don’t know how much it’s been shared or if it’s influenced anyone’s voting habits. I didn’t find out about it because I read an article in the liberal media lamenting it as an example of a particularly destructive piece of propaganda. I knew that too many misleading pieces like this existed, and since I didn’t remember one that had made any headlines, I simply went looking for one. I went to the page of a social media acquaintance I knew was notorious for sharing material like this. This person didn’t share this piece, but they shared another piece from BuzzfeedUSA.com, which led me to investigate that site. I picked the story about Obama as a Muslim agent because it was simply the most recent misleadling-sounding story I could find on their feed. I didn’t have to look for very long to find it.
That’s scary because it suggests that there’s a torrent of purposefully misleading clickbait pouring through the internet. Remember that the same bait and switch had been used by numerous other sites, all with the same several year-old story. With years of old stories to recycle in this way, there’s little to stop the further spread of this disinformation, except the critical minds of readers like you.
Now I know what some of you are thinking: the mainstream media also plays fast and loose with the facts, so why should we still trust them? To begin with, I never said we should trust them with 100% confidence, or even with 75% confidence. I do think they’re the best we’ve got, and this might even mean they’re only the best of a bad lot.
Someone I respect published an interesting article (in a mainstream media outlet) alleging that the problem with “fake news” is not as serious as the problem with false stories peddled by the mainstream media. He gives some examples of recent stories where he thinks mainstream sources have made unsubstantiated claims or reported facts out of context. As I read some of these stories, it’s not a slam dunk that the claims in question really are unsubstantiated or out of context, so they don’t strike me as the best examples to make the point.
The clear-cut example he gives (only in passing) is about the Rolling Stone story about alleged gang-rape at the University of Virginia. This is a clear-cut case in which the mainstream media reported an unsubstantiated and probably false story. But the very clarity of it is telling.
How do we know this story was false? Keep in mind that Rolling Stone is not exactly a paradigm case of a news agency in the first place: it’s an entertainment magazine. Only when mainstream media organizations (like The Washington Post and The New York Times) began examining the story did the flaws in it become evident. And then even though Rolling Stone is not exactly a news agency, it first apologized for and later retracted the story. See if BuzzfeedUSA ever bothers doing that.
The same point is true about the mainstream media, generally. They make mistakes, even dishonest ones. But at least they are accountable for their mistakes. The reason we know about the worst journalistic sins in recent memory is because the agencies responsible for them eventually owned up to them (begrudgingly or not) — and their rivals reported them. And as I’ve argued in previous posts, there is reason to expect them to do this: ultimately, they’re accountable not to some journalistic ethics board, but to their readers and customers. They need a reputation for reliability to continue to sell papers.
It’s bad enough to not care about the truth yourself, and the less you care, the more culpable you become for having surrounded yourself with liars.
I said that there was torrent of purposefully misleading clickbait out there. But could it be that all of these sites are simply failing to exercise critical scrutiny of their own, and just victims of an earlier con themselves? Maybe, but the longer they practice these bad habits, the harder it is to excuse them. Reflecting on the scope of the problem, I’m led back again to the philosopher William Clifford, who wrote the following:
Men speak the truth to one another when each reveres the truth in his own mind and in the other’s mind; but how shall my friend revere the truth in my mind when I myself am careless about it, when I believe [things] because I want to believe them, and because they are comforting and pleasant? Will he not learn to cry, “Peace,” to me, when there is no peace? By such a course I shall surround myself with a thick atmosphere of falsehood and fraud, and in that I must live. It may matter little to me, in my cloud-castle of sweet illusions and darling lies; but it matters much to Man that I have made my neighbours ready to deceive. The credulous man is father to the liar and the cheat; he lives in the bosom of this his family, and it is no marvel if he should become even as they are. (“The Ethics of Belief,” 1877)
Clifford is saying that the more careless you are about what you accept and repeat yourself, the more you encourage others to try to fool you and lie to you again. You don’t care about what’s true, so why should they care about telling you the truth? So the more you spread their lies, even unwittingly, the more you encourage their lies. But the more you do this, the more you are yourself culpable for aiding and abetting their mendacity.
Of course, I disagree with Clifford on one important point. He seems to imply that it wouldn’t be so bad if you were only lying to yourself — the problem is when you end up encouraging lying to others. For my part, I think it’s bad enough to not care about the truth yourself, and the less you care, the more culpable you become for having surrounded yourself with liars.
Read about Question 5 of the Sniff Test.
