As winter storms were buffeting parts of the country last week, our collective attention was drawn halfway around the world to Egypt. Images of the pyramids and the Sphinx covered in snow had emerged, and were being shared tens of thousands of times on Facebook and Twitter. It wasn’t hard to see why. For some, sharing the photos was a statement on global warming. For others, sharing was about the triumph of discovery, making them proud housecats dropping a half-chewed mouse of news on the Internet’s doorstep. For most, however, the photos were just another thoughtlessly processed and soon-forgotten item that represented our now-instinctual response to the unrelenting stream of information we’re subjected to every waking hour: Share first, ask questions later. Better yet: Let someone else ask the questions. Better still: What was the question again?
Needless to say, the photos were bullshit.It’s hard not to note the tidy symbolism here. The Internet, like the Sphinx, is a ravenous beast that eats alive anyone who can’t answer its hoary riddle. We in the media have been struggling for twenty years to solve that riddle, and this year, the answer arrived: Big Viral, a Lovecraftian nightmare that has tightened its thousand-tentacled grip on our browsing habits with its traffic-at-all-costs mentality—veracity, newsworthiness, and relevance be damned. We solved the riddle, and then we got eaten anyway.
The Egypt photos weren’t the only viral hoax to hijack the social media conversation in the past month. Of the others, the most infamous was reality-TV producer Elan Gale’s in-flight pissing match with a fellow passenger, which he documented on Twitter, and which was shepherded along by BuzzFeed to the delight of hundreds of thousands of onlookers. That it was actually a prank rankled some, but even that turned out to be a boon for the sites that shared it: They got the clicks coming and going, both on the ramp-up and in the reveal. The story may well have been, in the words of Slate’s Dave Weigel, “the sort of shoddy reporting that would get a reporter at a small newspaper fired,” but it was also a perfect microcosm of the way the Internet works now.
“We’re not in the business of publishing hoaxes,” BuzzFeed’s news editor wrote in response to Weigel’s piece, “and we feel an enormous responsibility here to provide our readers with accurate, up-to-date information”—which sounds a bit like Altria’s health inspector saying they’re sorry they gave you cancer.
The fact is, that sort of double-dipping is what most of us who produce Internet content do, myself included. Give me the viral pictures, and I’ll give you the truth. And then, after an appropriate waiting period, I’ll give you the other truth, and capitalize on that traffic too. It’s almost a perfect callback to William Randolph Hearst’s infamous declaration on the eve of the Spanish-American War, “You furnish the pictures and I’ll furnish the war.” Even more fitting, historians don’t think he ever said anything like that. Then as now, it’s the myth that plays, not the reality. Today it just plays on an exponentially larger stage.
The media has long had its struggles with the truth—that’s nothing new. What is new is that we’re barely even apologizing for increasingly considering the truth optional. In fact, the mistakes, and the falsehoods, and the hoaxes are a big part of a business plan driven by the belief that big traffic absolves all sins, that success is a primary virtue. Haste and confusion aren’t bugs in the coding anymore, they’re features. Consider what Ryan Grim, Washington bureau chief for the Huffington Post, told The New York Times in its recent piece on a raft of hoaxes, including Gale’s kerfuffle, a child’s letter to Santa that included a handwritten Amazon URL, and a woman who wrote about her fictitious poverty so effectively that she pulled in some $60,000 in online donations. “The faster metabolism puts people who fact-check at a disadvantage,” Grim said. “If you throw something up without fact-checking it, and you’re the first one to put it up, and you get millions and millions of views, and later it’s proved false, you still got those views. That’s a problem. The incentives are all wrong.”
In other words, press “Publish” or perish.
by Luke O'Neil, Esquire | Read more:
Image: uncredited
