A story hit the news cycle earlier this week: “Texas Man Found Eating Teenage Boy In Haunted House Attraction.” Except, it wasn’t news. The story was completely, 100% fabricated — a piece of fiction seemingly manufactured to garner clicks, shares, and pageviews.
And that it did: I heard about it after my husband texted me from work. “It’s all over Facebook!” he said. “My coworker is freaking out!” Being the skeptical guy that he is, though, he quickly assuaged his coworker’s fears through a simple internet search. The story, less than a day old, had already been debunked by Snopes.
How did the “cannibalism inside a haunted house” fake out manage to deceive so many people? Well, for starters, the website—I won’t link back to it, you have Google—has a legit-sounding name, looks fairly convincing, and fails to include any sort of a disclaimer along the lines of, “Hey, every news story on this site is completely bogus, so maybe don’t take what you read seriously, okay?” Then there’s the actual picture that goes along with the news story, which includes a blurred-out, bloody bathtub, a haunted house so creepy-looking that anyone would be ill-advised to enter it, and a mug shot of the alleged perpetrator. A mug shot! There are no context clues from which to draw the conclusion “this is a joke.” Also, the article is devoid of punchlines.
Fake news—well, it’s officially called “news satire”—isn’t anything new. Everyone knows the story of Orson Welles’ infamous 1938 War of the World radio broadcast. (Which is, itself, an exaggerated news story meant to discredit radio broadcasting.) When someone falls for The Onion we laugh at the poor fool, because although certain stories seem vaguely plausible, the site is clearly parody. But the stuff served up by sites like the one running the haunted house story seems to be specifically intended to strike right at the reader’s HOLY SH*T nerve (pretty sure that’s the medical term for it) for maximum viral sharing. As Gawker’s “Antiviral Guide to the Worst Hoaxers and Liars of Facebook” states, “These sites aren’t trying to earn your trust or win you as a repeat visitor, they’re trying to fool you once (shame on them) and profit from a big Facebook score.”
Well put, Gawker.
So what else have we been fooled by? Here are just a few notable incidents in hoax journalism:
- In 2009, we all panicked for half a second when we heard that Facebook would start charging a monthly subscription fee. The news turned out to be false.
- In January 2014, and then again at the beginning of this year, we were told that an unusual planetary alignment thingamajig would cause an upward gravitational pull, allowing us to experience a floating sensation, but only if we jumped at 9:26 a.m. The news turned out to be false. (The story was actually recycled from a 1976 satirical radio broadcast.)
- In June 2014, shortly after Jeremy Meeks’ mugshot (you might know him as “Hot Convict”) slayed women everywhere, news hit that he’d been hired on as a model…for some company…somewhere. The news turned out to be false. (And HuffPo had to say “oops!”)
- In October 2014, we read that Banksy had been arrested and exposed in London. The news turned out to be false.
- Last December, the news reported that Dustin Diamond had been arrested for first-degree murder. The news turned out to be false. (Though he was arrested Christmas day for assault.)
- And of course, of course Macaulay Culkin is not dead. Or dying. Or anything else like that.
Snopes is actually a really great source for fact-checking, with their new-ish (read: new since I’d visited the site last) Hot 25 list, a constantly-updated list of the most trending Snopes searches. On that list, at this very moment: Coca Cola hasn’t recalled a risqué advertising poster, no one has ever been poisoned by Halloween candy, a woman didn’t pleasure herself with a meat product in a Wal Mart bathroom (this is from the same site as the haunted house hoax), Jake from State Farm wasn’t murdered by his wife, and (sigh) there will never be a 6th season of Breaking Bad.
If there’s any takeaway in this, it’s that we all need to analyze the news we read before we press the “share” button. If something sounds too crazy to be true, a quick internet search can potentially verify whether it is or not. Ten seconds is all it takes to not scare everyone about cannibals in haunted houses. This country has enough real fear to go around without manufacturing it. Fake fear is fine too. But real fear created by something fake that posits itself as real doesn’t help anyone, anywhere, ever.
**By the way, if you’re planning on going through any haunted houses, be careful. You never know when you’ll be confronted by a disheveled man with scary facial tattoos and an appetite for human flesh. You heard it here first. (Second)**
