George Takei’s Biggest Link Post Ever Was Totally Fake News
Every year on April Fools’ day, we help George Takei put out a fake news story. Topics have ranged from “George Takei Will Host SNL” to “George Takei Will Star in the Next Star Wars Movie.” George gets his fans’ hopes up and then cruelly dashes them hours later; It’s truly his favorite holiday. This year, with the help of a small publication called The Daily Buzz, we helped him launch the mother-of-all-hoaxes: George Takei Drops Bombshell about a Congressional Run against — of all people — the widely reviled Devin Nunes of the House Intelligence Committee.
The story seemed like a brilliant scoop: The Takeis, it was reported, had mysteriously purchased property in Tulare County, California — there was even a picture of their new home. Takei himself had run for office before in a failed bid to become an LA City Councilman, so he clearly had left a political itch unscratched. The Daily Buzz caught him off-guard with the story, so he supposedly let the cat out of the bag and confessed his intentions to run for office. The post dropped on George’s Facebook page just moments after midnight, EST, but the fact that it was already April Fools’ (and that the top commenters were all warning of the ruse) didn’t stop many from reveling in the good news and sharing it widely.
George seemed to have happened upon a perfect storm where liberal America, yearning for white…er, Asian knights to come rescue them from the scourge of Trumpism, saw Takei as the ideal foil: the anti-Trump, if you will. The post went on to garner the single highest reach of any article in the history of his social media.
But that was not the most astonishing thing. Soon, press outlets and network media began trying to contact George, who was still chuckling over it, as he does every year. He reported that his email inbox had exploded. Offers from volunteers to help with canvassing and fundraising poured in. True to form, George coyly did not respond for many hours, and he was starting to feel a bit guilty that he had punked so many millions. Eager to gain traction on and clicks to their own version of the story, however, several websites (which we won’t call out here) ran the story without independently checking its veracity. This fueled further online credibility, because it was no longer just one source “reporting” it. George’s husband Brad, ever the concerned spouse, emailed asking our take on when they should admit to the joke. By noon that day, George posted his usual “Gotcha,” but with a plea for fans to help elect a real force for change with Jon Ossoff in Georgia’s contested 6th Congressional District, which had been his goal all along.
We’re quite certain that the “George Takei is Running for Congress” story was the biggest “scoop” that broke anywhere that week. We closely monitor activity across dozens of online publishers and all major media outlets — we’d never seen metrics like this since the Blue/Gold Dress controversy. It seemed absurd that a tiny, relatively unknown website like The Daily Buzz, albeit backed by social amplification by a major influencer such as George Takei, could create a fake news tsunami. But on further reflection, it all makes sense.
Platforms like Facebook and Twitter are great equalizing forces. An article from The New York Times gets as much real estate on a news feed as one from The Drudge Report. On the feed, they’re the same size, with the same amount of space for an image and a headline. Algorithms from companies like Facebook weight placement in the news feed based largely on engagement by users and affinity with the sharer. That means fake news, unless otherwise checked, can rise quickly to the top of feeds. Indeed, the more tantalizing the story, the more likely it is consumed and shared, even if isn’t grounded in reality.
Before the rise of the platforms as our preferred source for news, the vast consuming public had only the major papers and the TV networks on which to rely. When network media began to segment into conservative and liberal biases, and shock jocks grew their audiences on the radio airwaves, viewers began to consume the messaging as a way mostly to confirm and reinforce their existing world views. Social media-driven “news,” with its infamous filter bubbles, only deepened the divide. After all, if it’s Facebook’s job to show you the stories with which you are most likely to interact, and it’s been your practice to click on and share stories from, say, Occupy Democrats, it stands to reason that you’re likely to see content of that sort appear more often in your feed.
Social influencers play a large and under-discussed role in the dissemination of information. George Takei and his team, for example, pick daily stories to share off of our platform Contempo, which largely have a socially and politically liberal bend with posts from publishers such as Slate, Mic or The Advocate. Each share reaches over one million fans on average. Because George is a trusted and reputable source for many on the left, his decisions about what stories to share and focus on wind up broadly impacting political discourse.
It was George, for example, who posted stories about and brought widespread attention to the anti-LGBT “religious discrimination” bill signed into law in Indiana by then-governor Mike Pence. His #BoycottIndiana campaign led many big companies to threaten to withdraw their business from the state. Ultimately, the pressure succeeded in forcing Pence to sign a clarification measure, saying that nothing in the bill was intended to permit discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation, and de-railed Pence’s personal plans to run for president. (George notes the irony that Pence may yet wind up as president.)
The same influence, however, can be wielded to spread fake news. Purveyors of grist for the far- and the alt-right know this well. Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity and Alex Jones have enormous social media followings, and their ability to amplify fake stories have real consequences. To this date, many of their audiences believe that Hillary Clinton and John Podesta ran a child pornography ring out of a Pizza joint in D.C., and that the Sandy Hook school massacres were staged by child actors. It really is that bad.
So far, Facebook has focused its attention on whether certain publishers should receive lower placement in the news feed because of their propensity to disseminate false information. But it may also have to look at whether certain influencers are commonly associated with such stories. After all, fake news can migrate quickly to a rebranded pop-up site with no prior history of false representations. But if Facebook doesn’t start to track who has a habit of spreading false information, perhaps by building firewalls around reach from such sources, it’s never going to be able to get ahead of the problem of fake news.
But hey, as long as they exempt April Fools’ Day, we’re good.
