Oops, I Did It Again

fool me once....

Oops, I did it again. I fell for a fake post on social media and unwittingly helped spread misinformation online. Scrolling through Substack Notes, I came across an entry detailing the shellacking Jasmine Crockett administered to Mike Huckabee in a debate, and thinking others would also like it, I reflexively hit the like and re-stack buttons (I can’t find the Substack Note now, but if you’re curious, here’s a Youtube version). Almost immediately I regretted it, not because Crockett’s impressive put-down of Huckabee, relying on scripture to decimate his arguments, seemed any less brilliant after a second’s consideration, but because something didn’t seem right. I wondered what occasioned the Crockett-Huckabee debate and where and when it took place. Also, I was curious about how Huckabee responded to her argument. So I decided to check, and after a little research found that no such debate ever took place. The whole thing was a fiction. I was lulled into trusting it because it was on Substack, rather than Facebook or Youtube.

I should have known better. I’d already noticed, but never viewed, suspicious videos on Youtube featuring Crockett crushing MTG, Alan Dershowitz, Stephen Miller, and John Roberts, among others, in verbal clashes. I assume that Crockett, whom I admire, has nothing to do with the fake presentations. I’ve seen similar fake presentations about celebrities like Keanu Reeves, showcasing their awesomeness. I’ve also seen videos of contests that never took place, such as one titled Naoya Inoue vs Prince Naseem Hamed - Cross-Generational Dream Fight. A dream fight, indeed, since it never took place, because Prince Naseem retired in 2002 when Inoue was nine years old. While that video was misleading, it didn’t fabricate footage like the AI clip showing a Lennon-McCartney reunion decades after Lennon’s death. The fake Crockett-Huckabee debate, however, is more disturbing because it’s not just clickbait, but tricks people into believing that a political event took place that never occurred.

It wasn’t the first time I was taken in by a Substack post. Not long ago, this quote from Werner Herzog caught my attention: "Dear America: You are waking up, as Germany once did, to the awareness that 1/3 of your people would kill another 1/3, while 1/3 watches." A potent statement which, as you probably guessed, was never uttered by Werner Herzog, at least according to Politifact and Snopes. It’s still a pretty good line, but the false attribution ruins it. If not for the falsehood in which it’s clothed, it might be worth repeating, but the misappropriation taints it. Herzog’s name was attached to it, no doubt, to give the comment greater visibility. The creator might have thought something like, “If I post this under my own name it will get a few dozen views, but if it’s attributed to a famous German, it will have more weight and could be seen by thousands.”

The intent behind the false debate performance involving Crockett may also have been honorable. Maybe the person who created it, fed up with the bullshit spouted by religious hypocrites like Huckabee, framed a wonderful rebuttal, but couldn’t use it because not many of us has the opportunity to confront the miscreants polluting the airwaves, who face minimal push-back from broadcasters for their hateful rhetoric. Frustration about that could have lead to the construction of a fictional debate and passing it off as something that actually occurred. Of course, it’s equally possible that the only motivation, in both cases, was to fool people. Regardless of the motivation, the proliferation of false content does harm by reducing our trust in everything we read or see. Hannah Arendt and others have noted that totalitarian regimes rely on people no longer being able to distinguish between what is true and what is false.

The widespread manipulation of content makes me wary of everything I see online, even cute pet videos. There are videos featuring music created and performed by people who don’t exist. Thanks to AI, anything can be modified or created out of whole cloth, not that deception requires technological trickery. Consider the torrent of lies spewed out by Fox News and other media outlets totally unconcerned about the veracity of what they air. More insidious and no less damaging are the tactics “respectable” media like CNN and the New York Times use to distort, in more subtle ways, the news they present. I don’t know how a sizable portion of the population came to believe that vaccines are detrimental to health, immigrants are destroying America, transgender people are more dangerous than AR-15s, and Trump is making America great, but surely, pervasive deceit and misinformation has a lot to do with it. We’ve reached such a state that we all need cute pet videos for relief—and we can’t even watch them without fear that we are being duped.

(Does anyone else have a completely different reaction to Richard Thompson performance of Britney’s song than hers?)