Comment by randomwalker | Hacker News Reader

Comment by randomwalker | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

Normally I wouldn't vote up this kind of trash, but I see something interesting here.

"Mainstream culture" collapsed about a decade ago -- did you know that Seinfeld was the last TV show watched regularly by 50% or more of the American population? As the article notes, memes are increasingly where we get our culture. And hoaxes are an integral part of the meme landscape.

Anyone who can find a way to modify the Internet (not the Internet itself, of course, but people's use of the Internet) to better resist the spread of hoaxes could significantly change society. Think not just hoaxes, but outrages like #amazonfail. What a huge social cost (on attention, reputation etc) these things impose. http://www.shirky.com/weblog/2009/04/the-failure-of-amazonfa...

Now that might not seem like a great startup idea -- users are just having fun spreading links around (or getting outraged), and if you can't even monetize content then how can you monetize crowdsourcing the truth?

But then I noticed that Fox News and other media outlets fell for this hoax. Surely there's a significant monetary cost to that, which provides an opportunity for a business model?

The old Snopes way of doing things isn't working so well any more -- these things spread in minutes, so the fact checking mechanism needs to use channels similar to the ones that the hoaxes themselves do.

One possible idea is a prediction market (that pays out real money). If it is successful, it might become a standard part of media fact checking policy to check the prices there. A news organization probably be willing to actually wager a few thousand dollars -- a fraction of what the story is worth to them. Coming back to this example, that would give a tremendous incentive to one of the many people involved in creating this hoax to make a decent pile of money through the prediction site (anonymously, in fact). In effect, it would be a way for anonymous tipsters to leak out the word (in addition to aggregating third-party analysis and intelligence), except it would be far more streamlined and effective because it's a market.

Anyway, just a thought.

I like the idea, although I don't think it will stop this kind of thing spreading. I think most people suspected it was a fake, but still spread the story because it was a funny story. Its a bit like a modern version of "Two guys walk into a bar..." jokes. Everyone knows two guys didn't really walk into a bar.

Even if a meme is obviously not true, many Media outlets would still be prepared to report it as a "looks what's causing a stir on the internet" story. Although, having a slight possibility of it being true does give them some "journalistic cover".

There's something about the possibility of it being real that makes it more compelling. With this video, the "real story" aspect was needed to raise it above the "meh" threshold to make it viral. People passing it around, knowing that it was the kind of thing that usually turns out to be a hoax, were engaged in a collective suspension of disbelief.

If something becomes boring when we face up to what we already believe about it, then I think there's something wrong with pretending it wasn't boring in the first place. If there was a shortage of mildly gratifying and amusing stuff on the internet, then I would condone any means for dealing with that shortage, but damn it, that is obviously not the case. There are enough mildly amusing novelty videos in the world that we don't need to give any of them this kind of crutch.

I may sound like the kind of hysterical religious nut who used to say that novels were lies, and therefore evil, because they were not literally true, but fiction is meant to be appreciated by people who know it is fiction. My standard is whether I have to cultivate a misconception about the provenance of something in order to enjoy it. The obvious weak point in my argument is that reading a novel arguably involves reading it as if it were true, and that the way we lie to ourselves when we pass around a "true" story that we know probably won't hold up is no different from the we lie to ourselves when reading a novel. That may be true. I think it's not.

Anyway, why should we care? Because this is exactly the form of most of the political propaganda passed around on the internet: birther theories, black helicopters, the stories about prison camps and impending roundups (recycled from the Clinton years for Obama,) and so on. I think a sizable proportion of people who pass them around know they're not true, and simply find them gratifying. Obviously they don't mind that a large number of people end up believing them. If we're going to criticize that as intellectually wrong, then we should meet the same intellectual standards. If we accept that it's intellectually fine, then we are left arguing that their means are acceptable, and they're just working for the wrong side, instead of working for the right side like us.

To pinpoint it further, the mainstream culture is becoming skewed towards content that has "whatever can entertain me for 2 minutes" value. Facts about authenticity, social value, etc are secondary.

The News outlets cater to this nowadays, which is sad.

Its one of those things that has probably happened, but most people viewing it suspect that this particular instance isn't true. It's an urban legend in picture form. It amused us for a couple of minutes, and someone, somewhere probably dreamed of doing this for real. In the end, it is kinda harmless in itself.

The problem is that our 24-hour news cycle will play this instead of doing in-depth reporting of issues that actually affect us. I don't mean putting two pundits up on stage. I mean actually explaining what is going on (go through the health care bill, the AZ law, etc.). The love of fluff takes something like this from harmless to a distraction.

How is it a cost to Fox News if it gives them something interesting to talk about, already proven to be interesting by a million people passing the link to each other online? That it turns out to be a hoax just gives them even more to talk about.

Seinfeld was also a work of fiction, you know. There's a huge difference between staged entertainment - of which this "hoax" is a clear example - and actual manipulative deception.

Why is "Jen" quitting her job in an amusing and entertaining way any more insidious than Kramer turning his dresser into a capsule hotel for visiting Japanese businessmen?

Tools to prevent the kind of libel that damaged Amazon's reputation would be very beneficial, but let's not get carried away applying them indiscriminately to every meme in every context.

If that kind of thing even makes it on Fox News, at least it proves that "news" are not important.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com