You couldn’t make this up
I accidentally convinced hundreds of people they had to leave the country and abandon their children, says
Two years ago, if you’d told me that Mike Pence would be Vice President of the United States, I would’ve asked ‘‘What the hell happened?’’ Then when you told me what happened, I would’ve asked ‘‘What the HELL happened?’’
This is a question that will be asked in slightly less exasperated terms by political scientists for years to come, and if I know political scientists, those answers won’t be read by anybody.
History will choose its own narrative, right after it’s done vomiting up its insides, and I can’t imagine there will be much regard for whether it’s true.
And people have already begun. Those who saw Donald Trump’s election as a bad thing (ie. people with a conscience) have furiously started seeking out people and things to blame: Hillary Clinton. The DNC. James Comey. The media. The electoral college. Anthony Weiner. White people at large. Tim Allen for some reason. Even Grimace for appearing in an advertisement with Trump more than a decade ago.
Truth be told, it probably is Grimace’s fault, but in recent days, the mainstream media, as its enemies like to call it, have begun to coalesce around another explanation altogether: so-called ‘‘fake news’’.
The thing about fake news is, it’s much better than real news.
In the real news, seasonal worker caps are increased. In the fake news, John Key is kidnapped by a Peruvian drug cartel. In the real news, some movie makes a bunch of money. In the fake news, Hillary Clinton dies of a drug overdose before the second presidential debate and is replaced with a hologram.
In the real news, rents go up. In the fake news, Donald Trump is elected President of … wait a minute.
I know what I’d rather read, and so do tens of thousands of Trump supporters who, over the past few months, have lapped up totally fabricated news that pushes their world view.
To be honest, this explanation sounds a lot like excuse-making to me, and I tend to believe that fake news satiates rabid partisans, rather than unwittingly converting people to a cause. I feel that people are largely (if not entirely) unmoved by these deliberate falsehoods.
But something happened to me over the weekend that might suggest otherwise.
Fake news is something very near and dear to my heart, because technically speaking, as the writer of The Civilian, I write fake news.
Of course, I don’t do it to trick people, or to deceive them into believing something that isn’t true. I write satire, which is presented, totally straight-faced, as though it were real news.
The less clued-in among you might ask why I would present it as real news, if it isn’t? Well, because it’s only funny that way. If I put a massive disclaimer on the top, then it would immediately cease to be funny (although many publications I’ve written for in the past have not understood this in the slightest. But what do I know? I’m only a satirist).
On Friday, The Civilian published an article titled Civil Defence evacuates whole of New Zealand after engineers discover structural issues with the country. I thought it was a fairly cute article, and a nice way to round out a week of news almost exclusively about earthquakes.
Little did I know, it would become one of the most shared articles the site has ever published, and its reach would extend far beyond The Civilian‘s usual readership.
If you’re following the theme of this column, you may be able to figure out what happens next.
‘‘HELLO,’’ one person wrote me in all caps. ‘‘Just want to ask the credibility of [this] report … IS THIS TRUE? IF CORRECT, WHAT ARE THE [areas on the map I should evacuate]. It was not clear enough to read.’’
Others were more clued in, if only
Satire will still exist, and so long as there's anything on the internet that's not strictly accurate, people will need to be more critical about where they get their information from.
slightly: ’’Just wanting to let you know you should get your facts straight before publishing that a whole country has been evacuated, what a load of s..., sorry, but I live in chch, New Zealand and our country has not been evacuated due to the quake. Thank you very much.’’
Others were more abusive, calling me a ‘‘f...ing w...er,’’ telling me that I am ‘‘very sick’’ and that I am ‘‘talking smack’’ trying to ‘‘scare people’’.
I received literally hundreds of messages and emails to this effect. It’s not the first time this has happened, of course, but it was certainly the greatest volume of messages like that I’d ever received. If people can’t distinguish satire from real news, I wondered, what hope do they have of telling actual fake news from the real thing?
I hear a lot of people blaming the fake news phenomenon on the internet, and the fact that it has enabled anyone to write anything and put it out there. But having read hundreds of their messages, I feel like I have a particularly unique insight into the minds of those who believe this sort of thing, and I’d put it in a slightly different way.
It’s not that people can write anything. It’s that, today, people can read anything. Until recently, we haven’t needed to develop a mental filter. Information has come to us from very few sources, in very controlled ways.
In the past, information came through heavily-screened mediums like television, newspapers, and books.
People didn’t need to be so critical of where their information was coming from, because the vast majority of it would have been, at least basically, accurate. This isn’t true any more.
Of all the people I’ve seen over my years in satire who have believed that New Zealand was being evacuated, or that Bob Parker was actually dangled over Wellington via helicopter to give people comfort, or that John Key actually ate a kiwi (yes, people really believed these things, you have no idea how deep it goes), all of them had one thing in common: not for a moment did they ask themselves ‘‘What are the reliable sources of information I have access to in New Zealand? And is this one of them?’’
The Civilian had a slick logo, and a black and white page, and it was written like news, so it must be.
This is why efforts by companies like Facebook to ‘‘ban’’ fake news will ultimately be fruitless, because they don’t tackle the root cause of the problem. Satire will still exist, and so long as there’s anything on the internet that’s not strictly accurate, people will need to be more critical about where they get their information from.
It’s not my fault you believe what I wrote. It’s not even really the fault of the people who tried to deceive you. It’s your fault, and you need to think more critically before believing an article about an evacuation that tells you ‘‘do not collect your children’’.
I’ve always thought there should be civics classes in high school, but until recently, I hadn’t really thought about the fact that a significant portion of those civics classes should teach kids how to filter different sources of information.
And we shouldn’t just be critical of fake news or wary of falling for satire. We should be critical of what we read from any source.
Ask yourself: how does this journalist know what he or she published? How did they gather that information? Where did they cut corners? Why have they paraphrased here instead of a direct quote? Who did they talk to? Have they done their due diligence to verify the facts?
Not asking these questions of our real news is what leads to us not asking them of our fake news.