12/6/16

And that’s the truth!  Part I

I started writing this blog on Saturday evening. I wanted to clarify to my readers how I decide what I believe and what I don’t.  I didn’t post it because I wanted to take the time to set up a fake news site for a few days to see how that worked.  And then the PizzaGate story broke on Sunday.  If you haven’t heard, a fully armed man from North Carolina drove all the way up to D.C., walked into a neighborhood pizza parlor there, and fired several shots, thankfully missing everyone. Quickly arrested, he told police he was inspired to “self-investigate” the claims that the restaurant was a front for a Hillary Clinton run international child-sex-trafficking ring.

Think about that for a minute.

I know.

Apparently there had been a conspiracy theory circulating even before the election that was based on leaked John Podeska emails in which he mentioned pizza.  More than once.  And it grew from there.  No evidence.  Not a shred.  No tunnels under Comet Ping Pong pizza. No kids in danger.  Nothing.  And yet it was enough to put lives in danger from someone who believed it.

As Amy Davidson said in The New Yorker:  ...if you find it odd that any given person in America would, now and again, want to eat pizza; if you think that it is suspicious that people getting together to watch something on TV would do so at a pizza place; if you think that the phrase “I could bring a pizza home” is so bizarre that it must mean something else; or if hearing that something is baked in “a pizza oven” causes you to envision Hansel-and-Gretel-like images of child murder with the possible involvement of international terrorists and money launderers (and that is one of the charges), then this is the conspiracy theory for you.

There’s been a lot circulating on the prevalence of misinformation, especially on Facebook.  Part of that is because the business of news has been augmented by the business of fake news.  Used to be, you had to be capable of publishing and printing and distributing information, which limited news to those who were serious about it.  Or you went to a library, where the information had been curated by professionals. Or you were Art Bell, sending his messages of alien abductions and conspiracies out into the night from deep in the Mojave Desert. With the Internet, anyone can claim to be a news source and publish whatever they please.  If they can make the headline “click-baity” enough, they’ll get hits and eventually money.

So I thought I’d see just how easy it was to set up a fake news page.  Turns out the hardest part was thinking of a fake news name that wasn’t already taken by other fake news sites.   I tried:

The Real Truth

The Real News

The Light Of Truth

All The News

Need To Know

They were all taken, and a bunch of others, too. After a futile 20 minutes, I finally settled on Need2Know News.  I now have a Facebook page where I can post anything at all and make it look like news. Look me up. LINK

Then, after I started putting up posts, Facebook asked me if I’d like to boost my readership.  Click this button, they said, and for $5.00, we’ll start putting your posts out in the wide wide world of Facebook.  Like Alice, I pushed the button.  More than once.  And the looks and likes and comments started rolling in. In two days, I’ve reached close to 2,500 people with this dreck. That’s how it starts.

It’s been an eye-opening experience.  Although I tried to make it obvious it was fake, some people believed the things I posted.  They kept asking if my posts were real, especially the post about Trump appointing Hillary Clinton as his Secretary of State. There’s even a comment under a post about a cross-country tornado that deposited a live alligator in a west coast swimming pool, telling people not to worry about the effects of chlorine on reptiles. There are, of course, no cross-country tornadoes.

Now, I’m pretty sure none of that will get picked up on anyone’s news feed, but it was certainly easy enough to get started. And kind of addicting, to tell the truth.  Making up stuff is easier and far more fun that looking up research articles and confirming real, actual facts.  More on how that works in my next blog.

To be continued...