Nadine Higgins
Hijacking horror for cheap retweets
Among all the horrible stories about the Manchester attack there was one particular story that made my jaw drop more than the others.
It didn’t detail the lives lost, the injuries inflicted or the investigation.
It detailed the lies. The fabrications. The viral falsehoods.
But it wasn’t an ode to the great Fake News media conspiracy, it was a catalogue of the dubious posts created by everyday people so desperate to be noticed they decided to hijack a desperate situation.
Some posted pictures of missing children, asking for retweets to help find those children. Except those pictures were stolen and those kids weren’t missing at all. Others circulated a picture of a kid with down syndrome who was ‘‘missing’’, when the image was from a clothing company’s advertising.
Yep – if the bombing itself didn’t make you despair for humanity enough already, people actually used it to solicit followers and retweets. There aren’t enough swear words to adequately express my feelings about that.
Everyone’s Mum has, at some point in time, given them the sage warning: ‘‘don’t believe everything you read’’. But it’s never been so tough to determine what you should believe, and what you shouldn’t.
Trouble is, we use social media as an information source these days and there, the only fact-filter is you.
Online conspiracy theories are fairly easy to spot.
But other people’s version of events, eyewitness accounts and even travel and restaurant reviews are tougher to fact check.
About a month ago, I launched a new business – a food truck.
On the day we opened, we
Everyone’s Mum has, at some point in time, given them the sage warning: ‘‘don’t believe everything you read’’.
point, we could name them both and the commenter was neither of them.
They’d never been to the truck and they’d never tasted the food, but to the rest of the world it appeared to be an honest review.
Similarly, a guy this week got huge traction online by announcing he was boycotting McDonald’s over what he thought was a price hike.
Turns out he was accidentally overcharged and long after McDonald’s had won back its daily customer, the hate was still flowing on his original, now incorrect, post. Social media has given us so much power, hasn’t it?
And some people harness it to whinge about bad service when they haven’t even bothered to tell the waiter and apparently, other people simply make stuff up and it gets spread far and wide before anyone stops to find out if it’s true.
No matter how powerful, social media is a dubious source of facts. So, keep in mind what your Mum said – don’t believe everything you read.