In The Words of the Old Song

"People say believe half of what you see,
son and none of what you hear."  
Heard it Through the Grapevine - Marvin Gaye
and covered by many others (my fave)  

I don’t know about you, but I grew up with that saying, and hearing things that might or might not be true “through the grapevine” or rumor mill was an everyday experience in public schools before the age of smartphones and social media.  Considering the need for that caution has exploded with the rise of both, I feel strange for saying this but that common sense statement seems to have fallen out of general knowledge.  How many times have you heard that some “Tik Tok challenge” is killing people or otherwise causing problems?  I heard about another one this morning – jump out of a moving boat into the water, feet first.  Gee, going 40 mph in a boat is easy to jump out of, but doing 40 in a car on the road isn’t?  The root problem is people believing what they see, instead of thinking that the Tik Tok “influencer” pushing the challenge is faking the whole thing for clicks.   

Another great example was embedded in a meme a week ago in the wake of the historic supreme court decision against affirmative action.

This person had attracted a lot of attention for absolutely insane tweets like that one; it’s so stereotypical of the perception of a brain dead liberal that some readers just have to respond to it.  Some real investigative reporters (by which I mean not like me) started looking into the account and were pretty quickly threatened with a lawsuit.  Not by “Erica Marsh”, but by a guy named Michael Zachrau associated with a company in Belgium.  A Search Engine Optimization company whose business is “Social Selling.”  The story showing the evidence that Erica Marsh doesn’t exist and was a made-up person, created solely for the purpose of getting attention; re-tweets, replies, and creating controversy was posted on Townhall by Monday.  

By the end of the week, Matt Vespa and the guys involved in investigating the troll bot account had compiled a lot more information.

It turns out that this isn’t the only bot account that they have.  On Thursday, Irish posted this meme of two completely made-up bot accounts, as you can tell by comparing the text they tweeted.  

Entirely fabricated to create rage and get mad people to engage with the bot. 

There’s much more information in the two Townhall articles, but the main points are what I started with: “believe half of what you see and none of what you hear.”  Maybe, for social media, we ought to go with “believe none of what you see, and even less of what you hear.”  Or that other old saying, “if something seems too good to be true, it probably isn’t.”  Or too bad to be true, as in these cases.  Make sure kids know the saying and get the idea.

Which brings to mind another meme going around this week.

I understand that people have come to hate Bill Gates, but when I first heard of malaria in the states I thought of the millions of illegal immigrants that have been flooding into the country.  Importing mosquitoes is pretty damned easy, and the immigrants themselves have to be considered a source.  Most of them are from countries where malaria is more common than the US.  They all were bussed or otherwise trafficked through areas where malaria is more common than in the US.  It seems to me to be the first place to look.  Mosquitoes don’t cause malaria, they carry it from one place to another.  This tweet implies that the mosquitoes are creating the organism that causes malaria, a plasmodium (sorta like an amoeba but not one), which is a heck of a genetic modification.  Disclaimer: I had the undergrad classes about this damn-near 50 years ago.  There was no genetic engineering then.

I can’t prove it either way, but it sure seems easier to me to believe the millions of illegal immigrants brought the disease.