A 1,000-Man Mob Wrecks Havoc in Western Germany and Nobody Notices
Fake news, a topic that has been given a lot of attention from social media and newspapers lately, has also sparked discussions about the news’ credibility and peoples’ way of consuming news. It has been argued that social media platforms often remain the only source for new information. A lot of people scroll through their Feeds and click on the linked articles that have been chosen for them by algorithms without checking the facts or comparing several articles with each other. This is often all it needs to expose fake news.
Yet, they are still widely shared and encourage debates about stories that have never happened. One of such cases is the story first posted by the US news-site Breitbart claiming that “At New Year’s Eve celebrations in Dortmund a mob of more than 1,000 men chanted ‘Allahu Akhbar’, launched fireworks at police, and set fire to a historic church”
The article attracted my attention, because I myself spent New Year’s Eve in Dortmund and was taken by surprise when I read about this US-story a few days later. Of course there had been a few people shooting (small) fireworks in the streets, but I hadn’t heard of major incidents or violent attacks. In addition, the site even featured a video posted by Peter Bandermann on Twitter to support their story. In it, you could see a few hundred (mostly) men gathering in the streets, chanting and shouting.
German news seemed to have missed this incident completely. Even a few days later, there were no reports, no articles about it. Not even in the local newspapers. This was the first clue that there was something wrong with this story. When taking a closer look at the headline and especially at the video, a few more things seem suspicious and at the end, undermine the article’s credibility. First of all, the headline says “1,000- Man Mob […] Set Germany’s Oldest Church alight”: There seem to be a few hundred men present in the video, but it doesn’t look like a mob of 1,000 people. A mob has the connotation of angry people going against the police or protesting with a certain amount of violence in some way. These men do not look violent, there are simply chanting and celebrating the ceasefire in Syria. They are not attacking the police, in fact, they are not interacting with them at all. The policemen are simply standing nearby and seem to be in control of the situation. This exaggeration and the fact that the cathedral of Trier is the oldest church in Germany and not the St. Reinolds’ Church (as the text claims), prove that the headline only serves as clickbait, when the text itself has no further proof to the claims in the headline.
It turns out that Breitbart used a small incident to create their story and to fuel hatred against foreigners: “Stray fireworks did start a small blaze, but only on netting covering scaffolding on the church and it was put out after about 12 minutes”.
The fact that it was so easy for an US website to fake a story about incidents happening in Germany and that it was “clicked and shared by Tens of thousands” shows us how much trust is put into newsplatforms’ trustworthiness and how little time the average user takes to properly inform himself. Most just read the headline and move on, which is why such fake news place the most importance on catchy headlines. One advice Chief Reporter (CR, creator of a fake news site) gives, is to always check the content before sharing it, the reader should always be encouraged to “really look at what they’re going through and think, ‘Is this real, is this not real?’”.
