What the pumpkin spice condom teaches us about viral content and effective debunkings
I recently completed a fellowship with the Tow Center for Digital Journalism that saw me study how news organizations handle online rumors and unverified claims. I also examined best practices for debunking online misinformation.
This research is collected in a detailed report that you can download and read for free. It’s called “Lies, Damn Lies and Viral Content: How News Websites Spread (and Debunk) Online Rumors, Unverified Claims and Misinformation.” You can view the data we collected (and continue to collect) by visiting Emergent, our real-time rumor tracker.
Below is a report excerpt that offers a case study of the most debunked false rumor we tracked. The Emergent page with the data is here. If you like what you see, you should sign up for our weekly rumor roundup email.
On September 5, 2014 a Colorado web developer named Cosmo Catalano tweeted an image of a pumpkin spice-flavored Durex condom.
He created it in Photoshop to comment about all of the pumpkin spice offerings being rolled out for fall. His tweet initially received a few retweets, but over the ensuing days the image was scraped and reused by many other people on Twitter. It spread enough to capture the attention of a reporter at Quartz. She contacted Durex and its PR firm to ask if the condom was real. The answer she got back was equivocal, she said:
Several emails to Durex’s parent company, Reckitt Benckiser, and Virgo Health, the PR company that handles communications for Durex, didn’t yield a conclusive answer. A spokeswoman for Virgo Health said she couldn’t say whether the company was or was not actually developing such a thing.
That led to a story about the condom, which ran on September 8 with the original headline, “Durex will neither confirm or deny the pumpkin spice condom.” Other websites began to aggregate the story, though not in big numbers. We logged articles from Uproxx, Elite Daily, and PR Newser in the database.
A few hours after the Quartz story, BuzzFeed published an article with a definitive denial from the company: “Durex has heard that people are saying we launched a ‘Pumpkin Spice’ condom. We can’t claim this one, but we do love it when people spice it up in the bedroom.” The Durex Twitter account also pushed out that message. At that point, the rumor was debunked.
The pumpkin spice condom was one of the most successfully debunked claims in our research, and therefore offers some clues about strategies for effective debunkings. The first news organization to cover the story also demonstrated a responsible approach to covering unverified social content.
Key Takeaways
1. The claim picked up traction after it was debunked.
The below chart shows the number of shares for articles reporting the claim as false (red) versus those reporting it as true (green). (The gray bars represent articles that repeated the claim about there being a pumpkin-spiced condom.)
Contrary to the sharing trends we identified with other false claims, the pumpkin spice condom story saw the number of shares rise after it was confirmed false. This is because the vast majority of articles published were debunkings. This was also extremely rare.
We quickly identified and logged 16 debunking articles in the database, compared to the original four that reported the claim. (The Quartz and PR Newser authors soon revised their articles to reflect the fact that the condom was not real.)
We did not identify a single news article that wrongly reported this claim as true after it had been confirmed false. (The one story to report the condom as true came from Elite Daily and is the sole source of the green bar above.)
Based on the share trend and the number of debunking articles published versus those that reported the initial rumor, this was the most successfully debunked claim in the research.
2. It offers three clues to effective viral debunkings.
Why did this claim gain traction as a debunking? There are three likely factors.
A. Speed. Durex responded within a few hours of the first story being published. The claim had only been reported by four outlets at that point and had not yet gained serious traction. By acting quickly, Durex ensured the might-be-true narrative did not gain significant momentum.
B. Nature of the discussion prior to debunking. Anecdotally, the tweets examined in the course of tracking this claim rarely, if ever, declared the condom to be real. The discussion on Twitter was mostly of a joking nature related to the pumpkin spice craze. People were not focused on, or invested in, the element of verac- ity. They merely viewed the condom as an amusing idea.
C. Ability to maintain core virality. An examination of the text and tone of the debunking articles revealed that the articles were still able to take a fun, lighthearted approach to the story. The debunking didn’t ruin the joke; Durex’s playful response likely aided it.
In a Gawker comment thread about the tension between viral and true, Neetzan Zimmerman cautioned, “You really can’t have it both ways when it comes to viral content. If you want to capitalize on its sharing prowess and reap the [page views] that come with that, then you simply can’t take a hard- boiled approach to fluff.”
Critically, the pumpkin spice condom was still funny, even when called out as fake.
For example, the New York Daily News led its article with, “Oh my gourd it was a hoax!”192
But the most representative story came from MTV.com. It earned by far the most shares of any debunking claim. This was in part because its debunking also included suggestions for other amusing (and fake) Durex flavors, such as a Pulled Pork Flavored condom.
The fact that the condom wasn’t real didn’t spoil the joke or the opportunity for writers to capitalize on it in articles.
3. It demonstrated a more responsible approach to viral content.
Quartz was the first news organization to jump on this potentially viral story — but the way it approached the story demonstrated a level of restraint that others might considering emulating in the future.
It would have been easier and faster for Quartz to simply publish a post noting that people are talking about a possible pumpkin spice condom. That would have been a pure “journalism as an act of pointing” approach.
Instead, journalist Heather Timmons decided to reach out to Durex and its PR firm to see if she could answer a key question: Is it real? It was a jour- nalistic approach that didn’t prevent her from being first to the story. The fact that Timmons initially received an uncertain response from the PR firm enabled her to write a story that mentioned the possibility of its being real. (Once proven false, the Quartz story was quickly updated.)
This story showed that it’s possible to be early to potentially viral content, while still pursuing an element of reporting.
