One of my favorite hoaxes was in early 1962. There was a musical that debuted in 1961 called Subways are for Sleeping that was doing very poorly. For bizarre reasons (ads were banned in the New York subway system lest people take it as permission to sleep there) and normal (the reviews were poor).
But in 1962 an ad came out full of effusive praise from every prominent theater critic in New York. Every single one. From the Times to the Post, all of the famous theater critics in New York LOVED Subways Are For Sleeping
Except...
One of the papers paid to run this ad noticed something...off. Namely, that the editor knew Richard Watts the theater critic and he wasn't African-American.
It turns out that the producer of the musical had found seven New Yorkers with the same names as the seven biggest theater critics in New York, since while he couldn't lie and say they liked it, he could pay for *a* John Chapman or *a* Robert Coleman to see the musical and quote them next to their photo truthfully, bc how many people even knew what the leading theater critics in NYC looked like?
Turns out the producer had wanted to do this for ages, but had to wait for the NYT's critic to retire bc he couldn't find anyone with the same name. Anyway it worked: it went from being about to close, to running another hundred shows and winning a Tony
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I started reading The Book of Alien Races, which is supposedly this old Russian book of alien races translated into English by Dante Santori. Each alien is given maybe half a page of explanation, and it's full of low-quality pictures. The whole thing gives a low-effort creepypasta vibe.
I also found a video with audio where the Santori talks about how he supposedly got the book and what supposedly came of it, and it's got all the cliches. He and a friend supposedly found it while going through the friend's grandfather's old things. Santori claims he made a video about the book on YouTube, but the account was deleted within two hours. And then he claims that his friend was in a car accident, and when he looked inside the car to see if the original book was still there, it was mysteriously missing.
Like it's an incredibly obvious hoax; in fact, it's so obvious that I actually find it kinda entertaining.
Also I'm sorta getting tempted to make a conspiracy hoax trope bingo card.
FBI said threats were ‘hoax calls’, although universities took measures to prevent incidents on campuses
Joseph Gedeon at The Guardian:
Black students across the US were targeted this week by coordinated racist death threats, forcing at least seven historically Black colleges into emergency lockdowns just a day after the far-right activist Charlie Kirk was killed at Utah Valley University.
At New York University, Black students reportedly received a threatening manifesto specifically targeting them, according to an email seen by the Guardian from the university’s Black Student Union. The manifesto was said to contain “extremely graphic threats of gun violence” and stated the author was “coming for only n******”, citing the number of Black students as taking away from a “safe space” for white people.
In the email, the NYU Black Student Union criticized university officials for their “lack of transparency”, saying administrators waited more than six hours before informing students that the manifesto specifically targeted Black students. NYU did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
At least seven historically Black colleges and universities (HBCUs) went on lockdown on Thursday, including Alabama State University, Virginia State University, Hampton University in Virginia, Spelman College, Southern University and A&M College, Clark Atlanta University, Morehouse College and Bethune-Cookman University.
[...]
Most of the affected universities have since lifted their lockdowns but maintained enhanced security measures and canceled classes through the weekend as federal and local law enforcement agencies continue their investigations. The threats came amid a federal manhunt for the shooter who killed Kirk during a campus event on Wednesday at Utah Valley University in Utah, though the suspected shooter is now in custody.
Yesterday, on the day after the killing of Charlie Kirk several HBCUs were targeted with racist threats that forced lockdowns.
NBC 33 Baton Rouge - "Berwick Monster" - December 2010
"Okay, you know how we asked you to send in your pics so we can put them on our newcast? We got a few, but one viewer claims he found at a hunting camp in Berwick...last weekend, his friend's family found one of his hunting cams destroyed, but the SIM card was still there along with this crazy image..."
A famous slice of internet horror and the progenitor of a solid decade and counting of pale, long-limbed beasties in pop culture - and progenitor of the "cryptid" known as the pale crawler (oft conflated with the creepypasta creature, the Rake) - this creature first appeared on local news as a mysterious image from a destroyed trailcam.
It was speculated to be Photoshop, and as was often the case in the 2010s, was explained away as viral marketing for the Playstation game Resistance 3, even though they only kinda resemble the monster from the game - who notably have more than two eyes - and nobody stepped forward to claim it. More than likely it was a prank.
But it's a delightful time capsule - from the earnest Facebook feedback segment to the anchor talking about looking at the photo while alone at midnight, it's the local news cryptid segment at peak performance
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Next Tuesday (Oct 31) at 10hPT, the Internet Archive is livestreaming my presentation on my recent book, The Internet Con.
Media explainers are a cheap way to become an instant expert on everything from billionaire submarine excursions to hellaciously complex geopolitical conflicts, but On The Media's "Breaking News Consumers' Handbooks" are explainers that help you understand other explainers:
The latest handbook is an Israel-Gaza edition. It doesn't aim to parse fine distinctions over the definition of "occupation" or identify the source of shell fragments. Rather, it offers seven bullet points' worth of advice on weighing all the other news you hear about the war:
Headline writers have a hard job under the best of circumstances – trying to snag your interest in a few words. Headlines can't encompass all the nuance of a story, and they are often written by editors, not the writers who produced the story. Between the imperatives for speed and brevity and the broken telephone between editors and writers, it's easy for headlines to go wrong, even when no one is attempting to mislead you. Even reliable outlets will screw up headlines sometimes – and that likelihood goes way up in times like these. You gotta read the story, not just the headline.
II. Know red flags for bullshit
The factually untrue information that spreads furthest tends to originate with a handful of superspreader accounts. Whether these people are Just Wrong or malicious disinfo peddlers, they share a few characteristics that should trip your BS meter and prompt extra scrutiny:
High-frequency posting
Emotionally charged framing
Posts that purport to be summaries or excerpts from news outlets, but do not include links to the original
The phrase "breaking news" (no one has that many scoops)
III. Don't trust screenshots
Screenshots of news stories, tweets, and other social media should come with links to the original. It's just too damned easy to fake a screenshot.
IV. "Know your platform"
It used to be that Twitter got a lot of first-person accounts from people in the thick of crises, while Facebook and Reddit contained commentary and reposts. Today, Twitter is just another aggregator. This time around, there's lots of first-person, real-time reporting coming off Telegram (it runs well on old phones and doesn't chew up batteries). Instagram is widely used in both Israel and the West Bank.
V. "Crisis actors" aren't a thing
People who attribute war images to "crisis actors" are either deluded or lying. There's plenty of ways to distort war news, but paying people to pretend to be grieving family members is essentially unheard of. Any explanation that involves crisis actors is a solid reason to permanently block that source.
VI. There's plenty of ways to verify stuff that smells fishy
TinEye, Yandex and Google Image Search are all good tools for checking "breaking" images and seeing if they're old copypasta ganked from earlier conflicts (or, you know, video-games). The fact that an image doesn't show up in one of these searches doesn't guarantee its authenticity, of course.
VII. Think before you post
Israel-Gaza is the most polluted media pool yet. Don't make it worse.
There's plenty more detail on this (especially on the use of verification tools) in Brooke Gladstone's radio segment:
The media environment sucks, and warrants skepticism and caution. But we also need to be skeptical of skepticism itself! As danah boyd started saying all the way back in 2018, weaponized media literacy leads to conspiratorialism:
Remember, the biggest peddlers of "fake news" are also the most prolific users of the term. For a lot of these information warriors, the point isn't to get you to believe them – they'll settle for you believing nothing. "Flood the zone with bullshit" is Steve Bannon's go-to tactic, and it's one that his acolytes have picked up and multiplied.
It's important to be a critical thinker, but there's plenty of people who've figured out how to weaponize a critical viewpoint and turn it into nihilism. Remember, the guy who wrote How To Lie With Statistics was a tobacco industry shill who made his living obfuscating the link between smoking and cancer. It's absolutely possible to lie with statistics, but it's also possible to use statistics to know the truth, as Tim Harford explains in his 2021 must-read book The Data Detective:
There's a world of difference between being misled and being brainwashed. A lot of today's worry about "disinformation" and "misinformation" has the whiff of a moral panic:
It's possible to have a nuanced view of this subject – to take steps to enure you're not being tricked without equating crude tricks like sticking a fake BBC chyron on a 10-year-old image with unstoppable mind-control:
If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
