Friday, January 20, 2017

Gossip and Lies




This week’s post isn’t about something shiny and wonderful. It’s about evils of repeating gossip and making up lies. 

No, not wonderful at all.

I’m going to give three examples here—two from recent news and one that is personal. The first one is the story of Cameron Harris, who made up a story about uncounted ballots in order to make money off the advertising revenue. He needed a story that would make people mad, because people are more apt to share stories that outrage them, and more shares equals more clicks equals more money for Cameron.

And his story was shared by around 6 million people and he made about $5,000 from his lie.

That’s wrong. That’s clearly wrong.

But the people who shared the story aren’t entirely blameless. We all know that anyone can pretend to be whoever they like on the internet—“On the internet, no one knows you’re a dog”—and it’s up to us to check the source of something that incendiary before repeating it. Cameron used the name ChristianTimesNewspaper.com, but I wonder how many people even tried to see whether such a paper really existed?

In this case, we know the story was false because Cameron admitted to making it up when he was questioned about it. He explained why he chose the particular details he did for maximum effect, and the photo he used was identified as originating with a British newspaper on some entirely unrelated subject. It’s unlikely that everyone who read the original story will read an account of its falsity, but at least some will. 

But sometimes stories can’t be shown to be either definitely true or definitely false.

That brings me to the second example, the unsubstantiated reports of a Russian dossier of compromising information on Donald Trump. U.S. intelligence agencies investigated the contents of the reports, as did major newspapers, but couldn’t find evidence that they were true. Nor could they show that the reports were false. Officials decided to let Trump know of the reports’ existence, and newspapers reported that fact. But since the details could not be substantiated, most newspapers wouldn’t print them. Except, apparently, Buzzfeed.com.

I say “apparently” because I haven’t looked. I don’t think the details should have been made public. It’s not as though the average American is in a better position to investigate their truth than either the intelligence agencies or the major newspapers, so what purpose is served? And once you print something negative about someone, even if you don’t claim to know its truth, you have planted a seed of doubt in people’s minds and you can never take that back.

And on to the third example. Long ago and far away (so long ago that there was no World Wide Web, let alone social media, and so far away that it was the other side of the country), I was in a coffeehouse with my then-boyfriend (whose name I will omit.)

Some friends of his came in, and for reasons I will never understand, he decided to mess with them. He said, “Have you heard our big news?” and reached over to pat my tummy in a meaningful way.

Shocked, I looked daggers at him and he said, “I’m just kidding.”

That was all, apart from my yelling at him afterward, but I had seen his friends’ eyes go wide at his initial announcement. I remain hopeful that they all believed he had just made a really bad joke, but I’m afraid some of them may have wondered if perhaps he had said something true that he just wasn’t supposed to say.

And if they did wonder—if the seed of doubt was there—then there was nothing I could have done to remove it. Not even the fact that time passed and nothing newsworthy happened would have shown otherwise. After all, maybe the reason I’d been upset with what he said was because I didn’t plan to keep it. How on earth could I have proven otherwise? Even to try would have seemed to protest too much.

That’s how easy it is to start a rumor—and how impossible it is to take it back. Had there been social media back then, and had he made the joke on Facebook, it could have traveled far beyond the group of people who actually knew me. Even now, telling this story, I wonder if there is anyone thinking, “But why would someone make a joke like that completely out of the blue?” And all I can say in reply is, “Well, he did.”

So watch out for gossip and lies. Check your sources before passing information on, don’t make stuff up, and don’t repeat stories for which there is no evidence.

Because you can’t take it back.

Till next post.

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