No, it does not "say something about society" if you fall for fake screenshots. It just means you're gullible.
Let's talk about confirmation bias.
Yesterday, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis's spokesperson, Christina Pushaw, best known for her smearing opponents of Florida’s anti-LGBTQ “Don’t Say Gay” law as being “pro-grooming,” tweeted out a screenshot of what she claimed was an article from The Washington Post.
“More cutting edge journalism from the 49-year-old Washington Post activist infamous for showing up masked on random people’s doorsteps and sliding into the DMs of TikTok teenagers,” tweeted Pushaw, referencing the screenshot containing the headline, “This dog is the new face of online homophobia,” and referring to journalist Taylor Lorenz. Unfortunately for Pushaw, not only is Lorenz not 49 years old, but the article itself is not real. It’s a total fabrication.
Countless people pointed out that the article was not real, which inevitably brought out the most “I’m not owned” response possible from Pushaw’s defenders: But doesn’t it speak more about the media and the current state of the world that people can no longer differentiate between satire and reality? And the fact that the writer is Taylor Lorenz, who might actually write something like this.”
*sigh*
No. It does not actually “speak more about the media and the current blah blah blah.” It speaks to how gullible people are.
But first, just because it’s a little bit of fun, here’s a little bit about the dog from the nonexistent article!
This dog, whose real name is Whitney Chewston, has become a meme. Basically, in March 2021, someone thought it would be funny to take this picture of the dog sitting next to a glass of red wine, and added the caption “not too fond of gay people” to it. Since then, people have added other anti-gay captions to photos of the dog, meant to be something of a satire of judgmental homophobes.
In March, Lil Nas X tweeted a request for more pictures of the dog:
And he got responses:
The joke is funny because every LGBTQ person has absolutely met someone like the dog meme. The whole thing is a joke.
“Homophobic Dog” has its own Know Your Meme page, and the actual dog’s owners (who happen to be two gay men) did an interview with them, taking the joke in stride:
But back to the point at hand: no, being duped into believing something fake “doesn’t say something” about society. It “says something” about your willingness to believe anything that supports your own worldview.
Another example of this can be seen in this clip of Joe Rogan inventing a story, getting really upset about it, and… then learning that it’s fake.
There’s a really good Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal comic by Zach Weinersmith on this topic.
Here’s a portion of it below. Go see the full version here.
This is such a tired trope that it’s been immortalized in comic form! And Weinersmith’s follow-up nails it as well:
Why, when we’re confronted with our own mistakes and gullibility do we retreat into a place where we excuse ourselves rather than asking, “How can I avoid getting fooled again?” This isn’t even a partisan issue, as there have been countless memes and faked screenshots of things Donald Trump supposedly said (but didn’t actually). Just today, I saw people sharing a fake Fox News tweet.
Confirmation bias causes us to let our guns down. Whether it’s because you want The Washington Post to have run an article about Whitney Chewston (which, honestly, wouldn’t be a terrible article if it were framed around the life of pets that go viral as memes, taking on a life of their own) by a writer you don’t like, or if it’s just some schadenfreude about the idea of your political opponents pooping themselves, it’s easy to get fooled. The best advice I can give people when it comes to verifying stuff on the internet is that if it elicits a powerful emotion (happiness, anger, laughter, etc.), take a deep breath and do a quick search before sharing it. Especially if it falls into the “too good to be true” category. If you still fall for it, then that says something about you, not society.
Today’s tunes:
“What A Fool Believes” by The Doobie Brothers
There's a phenomena that I think is related, which is for a lot of people it's really hard to say "I don't know" even though, of course, nobody knows the answer to everything.
Similarly, everyone will mistake something false for being true at least on rare occasion, and it's important to be intellectually honest about those mistakes. The ivermectin tweet was one that momentarily got through my filters, granted only for about a minute, as it was retweeted by someone I don't expect to share misinformation. But I quickly caught it, and corrected myself, and hopefully it will improve my filters in the future.
Because how else can you learn? I guess that's the problem. A lot of people don't, and it's making things pretty bad.
Unrelated I wonder if the "quotetweet your friends, screenshot your enemies" thing might be a problem with regard to this as of course you can fabricate a screenshot, but not a tweet (aside from impersonating an account).
I was just thinking last night about how in college I read a completely wild article on Snopes claiming that Mister Ed was actually played by a zebra (it's still up and was a deliberate joke by the Snopes team back when they mostly focused on urban legends: https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/mister-ed-zebra/). It was Snopes so I totally bought it! For, like, several years! Until I enthusiastically mentioned this fun bit of trivia at a party and my friends looked at me like I'd lost my mind and we looked it up. I get viscerally embarrassed whenever I think about it but now I think I'm going to try to blame society instead