Please Don't Believe What I Said Because I Said So

On fake news and trustworthy sources, and why they aren't mutually exclusive.

Photo by Debby Hudson on Unsplash

Last semester I took a college class on mass communications. In case you’re new around here, or in case you’ve been reading for a while but somehow weren’t aware despite my obnoxious yapping about it in nearly every post, I am an Adult Learner or Returning Student, and I’m working on a bachelor’s degree in English. The class I took last fall was a gen ed for my major, and though it was pretty basic stuff I still managed to learn a lot. (Wait, is that something to brag about?)

I chose the topic of internet misinformation for my final project, and as a portion of that project I wrote and published an article that was absolutely rife with fake news. You can read it here:

Eleven Fun Christmas Facts For Small Talk at Parties

I tracked the responses to this piece across several social media platforms and in the comments here on Substack, and wrote up a report of my findings. I won’t bore you with all the details, but one very important element stood out to me and I am going to bore you with that one today.

Though I said outright in the original post that only one of the eleven fun facts was actually true, and invited readers to guess, only one person out of twenty-four who responded actually told me they were going to look up my claims and find out which one was true.

(Now, of course, it’s possible that everyone else also Googled the fun facts and discovered on their own that the true one was the last one. At least two people who took the time to comment suspected that #11 was true, but notably they didn’t tell me they’d verified this for themselves.)

I’m no statistician and I’m not going to try to extrapolate this admittedly very limited data into a scathing indictment of modern-day misinformation and gullibility. Part of the reason for this is that someone would certainly point out a flaw in my logic and then I’d be embarrassed, and another part is that a lot of the people who replied are my friends and I have no desire to be mean to them, and a very significant third part is that I myself have done the exact same thing many many times.

Because, you see, this was no carefully-controlled double-blind experiment. In order to make my point, I ruthlessly and unethically leveraged something very precious against my friends, social media followers, and Substack readers: their trust.

As far as I can tell, everyone who read this piece and replied had some history of relationship with me. Some of them were friends with whom I’ve had offline conversations, some were longtime readers of my Substack, some were social media acquaintances. (By the way, due to the nature of the experiment, I did not directly email this article to my subscribers—I didn’t want to risk alienating anyone who did not enjoy being tricked in this way—but I shared links to it several times on multiple social media platforms, including Bluesky, Instagram, and Substack Notes.) No one was clicking on the link because they had googled “help i need fun facts about holiday traditions so i can talk with my spouse’s coworkers at their christmas party.” The readers of this piece were people who, on some scale, considered my writing worthy of their time.

I’m not trying to pat myself on the back here, but to draw from my sad experience this useful lesson: that loss of virtue in a female is irretrievable—no, wait, sorry, that’s Mary Bennet. My useful lesson is that a preconception of virtue makes us lazier in fact-checking, and we are more likely to believe unverified stories from people we like and trust.

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Are people born gullible? Or is gullibility thrust upon them by the information overload and deliberate anarchy of social media? I don’t think I need to recap for you just how bad it’s gotten out there. The internet is full of false claims and greatly exaggerated reports, and I’d like to think that many of us (here on Substack!) who are deliberately choosing to pause, read, ponder, and engage with longform content rather than frenetic TikTok videos are pretty good at sussing out the unconfirmed fake stuff. If you, dear reader, stumbled upon an Instagram post purporting to reveal the long-hidden secret of how John Green is actually the Zodiac Killer and you just have to read every 33rd word in The Fault In Our Stars (backwards, of course) to decipher his confession, you wouldn’t be fooled. Because that kind of thing is ludicrous. (We all know Hank Green is the suspicious brother, OBVIOUSLY.¹)

But while a random conspiracy theory won’t take you in, a post shared by a friend (with information that confirms your already-held biases) just might. Fabricated Christmas-themed fun facts don’t hurt anyone, but unverified reports of political news, natural disasters, or even celebrity scandals absolutely can.

No, your friend Delphinium who’s been writing a thoughtful blog since 2018 would not intentionally lie to you. I’m not suggesting that you suspect her of that. But she, like you, is fallible and being hard-pressed on every side by people who are willing to lie and cheat and invent to push an agenda. She might share something in good faith that you could debunk with just a few search terms and a request for sources.

I’m not advocating for becoming an obnoxious “prove it!!! Pics or it didn’t happen!!!!” reply girl. But I do think we all hold the code to a wealth of information under our very thumbs, and we’re doing ourselves a disservice if we don’t use it.

One more additional note before I close this. Not a rabbit trail. Just an aside.

When I shared my fake facts on Bluesky, someone pointed out (kindly, and with humor!) that it didn’t really matter which facts were fake: ChatGPT would not discriminate. And she’s right! As ChatGPT and other LLMs build their databases, they are pulling information from articles posted online and doing absolutely no work to independently verify this information. ChatGPT is not media-literate because ChatGPT is not literate at all. It cannot think; it can only compile. As more and more students are bargaining the development of their own intelligence for the instant gratification of easy quiz answers, they risk being completely hoodwinked by “information anarchists” on the Internet. My experiment was not designed to mislead, but rather to make people think. But I, the author, have no control over what may happen to these deliberately false words (clearly revealed to be false, at the end of the piece!) in the ether of the Internet. If some lazy writer chooses to use AI to build their own “fun facts” clickbait piece, they may inadvertently inform their readers that St. Nicholas once rode on a camel train—and will have only themselves to blame.

And finally, one commenter—Rachel— who is also a teacher asked permission to use this article in her class, and her response may be my favorite. Rachel is doing the work preemptively to foster critical thinking skills in her students. She is helping them to practice the five stages of media literacy (description, analysis, interpretation, evaluation, and engagement) to master the critical process for themselves. This exercise is key to raising a new generation of readers who are astute, aware of the ways in which they can be fooled (even by sources they typically trust!) and eager to write with journalistic integrity. Rachel, if you’re reading this: thank you.

Only time will tell if our culture is willing to do this work and resist the temptation to read and believe indiscriminately— and with that, I will close my Fordyce’s Sermons and leave you to reflect on what you have read, and make extracts.

1. for legal purposes this is a joke. I am a great admirer of the Vlogbrothers’ work. If they read this please do not sue me.