I was recently linked to this story on Facebook: U.S. Government Bans Native American Tribe From Protesting On Their Own Land – Send In Police To Remove Protesters.
As far as I can tell, the linked story is bullshit. First, it’s unclear which judicial action it’s reporting on. The article was written on September 7th, but the only judicial action on that day was actually a victory for Native American protestors.
Digging a little deeper, however, it appears that this is actually just a spam site that’s repackaging a story that got a lot of clicks on Facebook so that it can harvest some of that proven clickbait. It was most likely posted by an algorithm that noticed an uptick in Native American-related or pipeline-related stories on social media, and decided to copy-paste an earlier story on those topics which was a known success at attracting likes and shares.
The story it was copying, however, was actually just a spammy repackaging of actual reporting that had taken place several days earlier by Telesur.
Telesur’s story, however, wasn’t accurate. And their headline (“Native Americans Banned from Protesting Pipeline on Own Land”) was total bullshit. As Native News Online accurately reported, the judge’s order only prohibited them from physically interfering with construction. It didn’t ban them from protesting. Furthermore, the site covered by the judge’s order wasn’t actually on a Native American reservation, so it never banned them from ANYTHING “on their own land”.
So, to sum up: Inaccurate reporting tied to a completely inaccurate headline caused a bunch of fringe websites to post mock-outrage stories about something that wasn’t actually happening. One of those mock-outrage stories remixed the headline into a mostly fact-free rant masquerading as a news story and paired it to a really great photograph that caused people to click it and share it. Then some trashy sites noticed that the post was popular and duped it in order to harvest the advertising revenue.
The photograph, by the way, is actually of a Brazilian man from 2012: “An indigenous man stands as riot police stand guard during the UN Conference on Sustainable Development, or Rio+20, in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, Wednesday, June 20, 2012. Brazil’s indigenous are protesting the government’s plan to construct the large Belo Monte hydroelectric dam in the Amazon.”
And that’s how most Americans are getting their news in 2016.
Which is a problem. Because, as we’ve just demonstrated, what the algorithms, systems, and mob psychology of social media select for is not the dissemination of truth. It is the dissemination of outrage. When you unthinkingly allow yourself to take in that outrage, you’re doing a disservice to yourself. And when you unthinkingly allow that outrage to drive your actions — even the simple action of hitting a Like or Share or Retweet or Up Vote button — you’re doing a disservice to everyone around you.
It’s been a while since I started reading your blog, this is the first time I see something related to my country, I guess. It’s a pitty that’s a picture I cannot be proud of.
The sad fact is that even as these kinds of stories are passed around, usually five minutes with Google will catch them out as lies created for various reasons. It’s like people don’t realize that they can highlight text and search on the very same device that they received the story from…
I see this kind of thing every day, especially when it comes to scientific studies. I swear, most of my time on Facebook’s just spent explaining to friends why the crap they post is stupid
I don’t know what’s more frustrating:
1) that I’m a conservative, yet I keep having to defend liberals because right-wing clickbait’s some of the worst out there, OR
2) that I’ve told my friends countless times they only need to do about five seconds of research to figure out what’s B.S., yet they still keep sharing it!
Thank you for this. Given how pervasive the culture of outrage has become online, we could all use a regular reminder.
@Professor Oats: It’s interesting that you feel that way as a conservative, because as a moderate liberal I feel like I spend most of my time debunking stupid liberal memes. (Case in point with this post.)
Sometimes I feel like that’s because my self-selected social circle and the algorithms of social media are serving up more liberal stuff in general (and, thus, more liberal nonsense as a percentage of that). Sometimes I feel that it’s that I subconsciously hold those ideologically similar to me to a higher standard; or maybe that I feel small corrections are more likely to have some sort of meaningful effect. (If I see someone ranting about Obama’s death panels, for example, the distance between that and truth seems so vast that the time necessary to engage with it just doesn’t seem worth it.)
I can’t seem to get it though peoples heads the actual Dictionary definitions of the words used in the political and social realm. I’m so glad I switch professions before becoming a full fledged Socials Studies teacher. It probably would have killed me.
Generally I rate my Liberal friends slightly better then my Conservative ones, simply because there is a point (however hard to reach) where most will admit on being wrong, or fooled about something. My Conservative friends will never fact check anything, ever, even including the times there is actual data to help them.
My friends all think I’m some sort of crypto-luddite for refusing to use Facebook. When I try to tell them that it’s because of how I object to things like the bullshit covered in this article, they’re not so much unaware of it all as it is that they don’t care very much (at least compared to the utility they get out of it).
I just wanted to praise the sane dialogue and discussion between conservative and liberal. It just doesn’t happen enough to not acknowledge.
Fake news, as a phenomenon or the information it carries, isnt a new issue. But it always been devastating
According to John Ehlrichman of the Nixon administration, the increase in intensity in persecuting drug users was entirely to make up for the fact they couldn’t directly make anti war or civil rights activism illegal.
The war on drugs is responsible for turning entire generations of nonviolent offenders into fodder for the world’s biggest prison system rife with atrocious abuses. And every single politician has benefited from the de facto political repression of populations most liekly to rebel against imperialism and racism, which so happen to be good for business. Prison and police unions successfully lobby for harsher penalties based on lies simply to line their pockets and increase the power of the militarized beat cop.
This is doubly bad, because of how much fake news starts wars.
From the bay of Tonkin to the persion gulf, to the shores of Tripoli, fake news has killed tens of millions of innocent people. It has lead to genocide and instability all across the globe. Its serious business.
We are so eager to believe the breathless drama of Good vs Evil, we cant imagine our Good journos and politicians brazenly lying about a Bad person like Gadaffi or Ho Chi Minh–they must be Bad because we are Good and have a free press, right? Not really–the press’s access to government interviews is contingent upon having a good rapport with the administration, and they are workers primarily interested in keeping their jobs. Advertisers dont want negative press about the Goodness of America and the Rightness of war getting in the way of profits, because of journo’s accusations of impious lack of patriotism
Anyone doubting the Bush admin’s open baldfaced lies about Iraq was treated as a crackpo, and its still gauche to bring it up. Anyone who points out the CIA hired on hundreds of Nazis after the War is considered untrustworthy–why is this?
Fake news isnt some alien thing without precedence. Its a direct expression of the ideological makeup of the people. We’re completely hemmed in by a very narrowly defined set of acceptable political ideas which quickly stop making sense the further you go from senate committee and board room meetings, yet there isnt a robust alternative to the mainstream press, leaving people open to being swept up in bad news and strange conspiracies (which then in a strange turn of events inoculates society from accountability over real conspiracies, like the bay of tonkin incident lies).
Also, Technically its still their land, Whites just occupy it. Unless Might Makes Right, indigenous people still have the rightful claim to North American territories occupied by the decedents of trigger-happy colonizers, otherwise people in Poland or the Ukraine had no reason to complain about the Wehrmacht. The fact that we object to Lebensraum, but not to the Manifest Destiny it was inspired by, says a lot about morality for most Americans being more about safeguarding our own imperialism and colonialism against rival upstarts (like Gaddafi’s plans for an alternative source of finance for africa or Saddam’s invasion of Kuwait) than any true claim to respecting universal human rights–theres little to no evidence of the US doing this in the historical record, and none today that supports it.
The US had broken every treaty its ever signed with indigenous people. Every single one. The fact we stil think this is a country of laws and personal liberty is perhaps the biggest fake news story to date.