'Nothing On This Page Is Real': How Lies Become Truth Online
The only light in the
house came from the glow of three computer monitors, and Christopher Blair, 46,
sat down at a keyboard and started to type. His wife had left for work and his
children were on their way to school, but waiting online was his other community,
an unreality where nothing was exactly as it seemed. He logged onto his website
and began to invent his first news story of the day.
"BREAKING,"
he wrote, pecking out each letter with his index fingers as he considered the
possibilities. Maybe he would announce that Hillary Clinton had died during a
secret overseas mission to smuggle more refugees into America. Maybe he would
award President Donald Trump the Nobel Peace Prize for his courage in denying
climate change.
A new message popped
onto Blair's screen from a friend who helped with his website. "What viral
insanity should we spread this morning?" the friend asked.
"The more extreme
we become, the more people believe it," Blair replied.
He had launched his new
website on Facebook during the 2016 presidential campaign as a practical joke
among friends - a political satire site started by Blair and a few other
liberal bloggers who wanted to make fun of what they considered to be extremist
ideas spreading throughout the far right. In the last two years on his page,
America's Last Line of Defence, Blair had made up stories about California
instituting sharia, former president Bill Clinton becoming a serial killer,
undocumented immigrants defacing Mount Rushmore, and former president Barack
Obama dodging the Vietnam draft when he was 9. "Share if you're
outraged!" his posts often read, and thousands of people on Facebook had
clicked "like" and then "share," most of whom did not
recognise his posts as satire. Instead, Blair's page had become one of the most
popular on Facebook among Trump-supporting conservatives over 55.
"Nothing on this
page is real," read one of the 14 disclaimers on Blair's site, and yet in
the America of 2018 his stories had become real, reinforcing people's biases,
spreading onto Macedonian and Russian fake news sites, amassing an audience of
as many 6 million visitors each month who thought his posts were factual. What
Blair had first conceived of as an elaborate joke was beginning to reveal
something darker. "No matter how racist, how bigoted, how offensive, how
obviously fake we get, people keep coming back," Blair once wrote, on his
own personal Facebook page. "Where is the edge? Is there ever a point
where people realize they're being fed garbage and decide to return to
reality?"
 |
| Christopher Blair's made-up stories sometimes make him as much as US$15,000 a month. Photo/Washington Post. |
Blair's own reality was
out beyond the shuttered curtains of his office: a three-bedroom home in the
forest of Maine where the paved road turned to gravel; not his house but a
rental; not on the lake but near it. Over the past decade, his family had moved
around the country a half-dozen times as he looked for steady work, bouncing
between construction and restaurant jobs while sometimes living on food stamps.
During the economic crash of 2008, his wife had taken a job at Wendy's to help
pay down their credit-card debt, and Blair, a lifelong Democrat, had begun
venting his political frustration online, arguing with strangers in an Internet
forum called Brawl Hall. He sometimes masqueraded as a tea party conservative
on Facebook so he could gain administrative access into their private groups
and then flood their pages with liberal ideas before using his administrative
status to shut their pages down.
He had created more
than a dozen online profiles over the last years, sometimes disguising himself
in accompanying photographs as a beautiful Southern blond woman or as a
bandana-wearing conservative named Flagg Eagleton, baiting people into making
racist or sexist comments and then publicly eviscerating them for it. In his
writing, Blair was blunt, witty and prolific, and gradually he'd built a
liberal following on the Internet and earned a full-time job as a political
blogger. On the screen, like nowhere else, he could say exactly how he felt and
become whomever he wanted.
Now he hunched over a
desk wedged between an overturned treadmill and two turtle tanks, scanning
through conservative forums on Facebook for something that might inspire his
next post. He was 6-foot-6 and 325 pounds, and he typed several thousand words
each day in all capital letters. He noticed a photo online of Trump standing at
attention for the national anthem during a White House ceremony. Behind the
president were several dozen dignitaries, including a white woman standing next
to a black woman, and Blair copied the picture, circled the two women in red
and wrote the first thing that came into his mind.
"President Trump
extended an olive branch and invited Michelle Obama and Chelsea Clinton,"
Blair wrote. "They thanked him by giving him 'the finger' during the
national anthem. Lock them up for treason!"
Blair finished typing
and looked again at the picture. The white woman was not, in fact, Chelsea
Clinton but former White House strategist Hope Hicks. The black woman was not
Michelle Obama but former Trump aide Omarosa Newman. Neither Obama nor Clinton
had been invited to the ceremony. Nobody had flipped off the president. The
entire premise was utterly ridiculous, which was exactly Blair's point.
"We live in an
Idiocracy," read a small note on Blair's desk, and he was taking full
advantage. In a good month, the advertising revenue from his website earned him
as much as US$15,000 (NZ$21,805), and it had also won him a loyal army of
online fans. Hundreds of liberals now visited America's Last Line of Defense to
humiliate conservatives who shared Blair's fake stories as fact. In Blair's
private Facebook messages with his liberal supporters, his conservative
audience was made up of "sheep," "hillbillies,"
"maw-maw and paw-paw," "TrumpTards," "potatoes"
and "taters."
"How could any
thinking person believe this nonsense?" he said. He hit the publish button
and watched as his lie began to spread.
 |
| Shirley Chapian sometimes wakes up to check Facebook in the middle of the night. Photo/Washington Post. |
It was barely dawn in
Pahrump, Nevada, when Shirley Chapian, 76, logged onto Facebook for her morning
computer game of Criminal Case. She believed in starting each day with a
problem-solving challenge, a quick mental exercise to keep her brain sharp more
than a decade into retirement. For a while, it had been the daily crossword
puzzle, but then the local newspaper stopped delivering and a friend introduced
her to the viral Facebook game with 65 million players. She spent an hour as a
1930s detective, interrogating witnesses and trying to parse their lies from
the truth until finally she solved case No. 48 and clicked over to her Facebook
news feed.
"Good morning, Shirley!
Thanks for being here," read an automated note at the top of her page. She
put her finger on the mouse and began scrolling down.
"Click LIKE if you
believe we must stop Sharia Law from coming to America before it's too
late," read the first item, and she clicked "like."
"Share to help END
the ongoing migrant invasion!" read another, and she clicked
"share."
The house was empty and
quiet except for the clicking of her computer mouse. She lived alone, and on
many days her only personal interaction occurred here, on Facebook. Mixed into
her morning news feed were photos and updates from some of her 300 friends, but
most items came directly from political groups Chapian had chosen to follow:
"Free Speech Patriots," "Taking Back America," "Ban
Islam," "Trump 2020" and "Rebel Life." Each political
page published several posts each day directly into Chapian's feed, many of
which claimed to be "BREAKING NEWS."
On her computer the
attack against America was urgent and unrelenting. Liberals were restricting
free speech. Immigrants were storming the border and casting illegal votes.
Politicians were scheming to take away everyone's guns. "The second you
stop paying attention, there's another travesty underway in this country,"
Chapian once wrote, in her own Facebook post, so she had decided to always pay
attention, sometimes scrolling and sharing for hours at a time.
"BREAKING:
Democrat mega-donor accused of sexual assault!!!"
"Is Michelle Obama
really dating Bruce Springsteen?"
"Iowa Farmer
Claims Bill Clinton had Sex with Cow during 'Cocaine Party.' "
 |
| Shirley Chapian is one of many increasingly relying on obscure Facebook pages for news. Photo/Washington Post. |
On display above
Chapian's screen were needlepoints that had once occupied much of her free
time, intricate pieces of artwork that took hundreds of hours to complete, but
now she didn't have the patience. Out her window was a dead-end road of
identical beige-and-brown rock gardens surrounding double-wide trailers that
looked similar to her own, many of them occupied by neighbours whom she'd never
met. Beyond that was nothing but cactuses and heat waves for as far as she
could see - a stretch of unincorporated land that continued from her backyard
into the desert.
She'd spent almost a
decade in Pahrump without really knowing why. The heat could be unbearable. She
had no family in Nevada. She loved going to movies, and the town of 30,000
didn't have a theatre. It seemed to her like a place in the business of luring
people - into the air-conditioned casinos downtown, into the legal brothels on
the edge of the desert, into the new developments of cheap housing available
for no money down - and in some ways she'd become stuck, too.
She had lived much of
her life in cities throughout Europe and across the United States - places such
as San Francisco, New York and Miami. She'd gone to college for a few years and
become an insurance adjuster, working as one of the few women in the field in
the 1980s and '90s and joining the National Organization for Women to advocate
for an equal wage before eventually moving to Rhode Island to work for a
hospice and care for her aging parents. After her mother died, Chapian decided
to retire and move to Las Vegas to live with a friend, and when Las Vegas
become too expensive a real estate agent told her about Pahrump. She bought a
three-bedroom trailer for less than $100,000 and painted it purple. She met a
few friends at the local senior centre and started eating at the Thai
restaurant in town. A few years after arriving, she bought a new computer
monitor and signed up for Facebook in 2009, choosing as her profile image a
photo of her cat.
"Looking to
connect with friends and other like-minded people," she wrote then.
She had usually voted
for Republicans, just like her parents, but it was only on Facebook that
Chapian had become a committed conservative. She was wary of Obama in the
months after his election, believing him to be both arrogant and inexperienced,
and on Facebook she sought out a litany of information that seemed to confirm
her worst fears, unaware that some of that information was false. It wasn't
just that Obama was liberal, she read; he was actually a socialist. It wasn't
just that his political qualifications were thin; it was that he had fabricated
those qualifications, including parts of his college transcripts and maybe even
his birth certificate.
For years she had
watched network TV news, but increasingly Chapian wondered about the widening
gap between what she read online and what she heard on the networks. "What
else aren't they telling us?" she wrote once, on Facebook, and if she
believed the mainstream media was becoming insufficient or biased, it was her
responsibility to seek out alternatives. She signed up for a dozen conservative
newsletters and began to watch Alex Jones on Infowars. One far-right Facebook
group eventually led her to the next with targeted advertising, and soon
Chapian was following more than 2,500 conservative pages, an ideological echo
chamber that often trafficked in scepticism. Climate change was a hoax. The
mainstream media was censored or scripted. Political Washington was under
control of a "deep state."
Chapian didn't believe
everything she read online, but she was also distrustful of mainstream
fact-checkers and reported news. It sometimes felt to her like real facts had
become indiscernible - that the truth was often somewhere in between. What she
trusted most was her own ability to think critically and discern the truth, and
increasingly her instincts aligned with the online community where she spent
most of her time. It had been months since she'd gone to a movie. It had been
almost a year since she'd made the hour-long trip to Las Vegas. Her number of
likes and shares on Facebook increased each year until she was sometimes
awakening to check her news feed in the middle of the night, liking and
commenting on dozens of posts each day. She felt as if she was being let in on
a series of dark revelations about the United States, and it was her
responsibility to see and to share them.
"I'm not a
conspiracy-theory-type person, but . . ." she wrote, before sharing a link
to an unsourced story suggesting that Democratic donor George Soros had been a
committed Nazi, or that a Parkland shooting survivor was actually a paid actor.
Now another post
arrived in her news feed, from a page called America's Last Line of Defense,
which Chapian had been following for more than a year. It showed a picture of
Trump standing at a White House ceremony. Circled in the background were two
women, one black and one white.
"President Trump
extended an olive branch and invited Michelle Obama and Chelsea Clinton,"
the post read. "They thanked him by giving him 'the finger' during the
national anthem."
Chapian looked at the
photo and nothing about it surprised her. Of course, Trump had invited Clinton
and Obama to the White House in a generous act of patriotism. Of course the
Democrats - or "Demonrats," as Chapian sometimes called them - had
acted badly and disrespected America. It was the exact same narrative she saw
playing out on her screen hundreds of times each day, and this time she decided
to click 'like' and leave a comment.
"Well, they never
did have any class," she wrote.
Blair had invented
thousands of stories in the past two years, always trafficking in the same stereotypes
to fool the same people, but he never tired of watching a post take off: Eight
shares in the first minute, 160 within 15 minutes, more than 1,000 by the end
of the hour.
"Aaaaand, we're
viral," he wrote, in a message to his liberal supporters on his private
Facebook page. "It's getting to the point where I can no longer control
the absolute absurdity of the things I post. No matter how ridiculous, how
obviously fake, or how many times you tell the same taters . . . they will
still click that 'like' and hit that share button."
By the standards of
America's Last Line of Defense, the item about Michelle Obama and Chelsea
Clinton was only a moderate success. It included no advertisements, so it
wouldn't earn Blair any money. It wasn't even the most popular of the 11 items
he'd published that day. But, just an hour earlier, Blair had come up with an
idea at his computer in Maine, and now hundreds or maybe thousands of people
across the country believed Obama and Clinton had flipped off the president.
"Gross. Those
women have no respect for themselves," wrote a woman in Fort Washakie,
Wyoming.
"They deserve to
be publicly shunned," said a man in Gainesville, Florida.
"Not surprising
behaviour from such ill-bred trash."
"Jail them
now!!!"
Blair had fooled them.
Now came his favourite part, the gotcha, when he could let his victims in on
the joke.
"OK, taters.
Here's your reality check," he wrote on America's Last Line of Defense,
placing his comment prominently alongside the original post. "That is Omarosa
and Hope Hicks, not Michelle Obama and Chelsea Clinton. They wouldn't be caught
dead posing for this pseudo-patriotic nationalistic garbage . . .
Congratulations, stupid."
Beyond the money he
earned, this was what Blair had conceived of as the purpose for his website: to
engage directly with people who spread false or extremist stories and prove
those stories were wrong. Maybe, after people had been publicly embarrassed,
they would think more critically about what they shared online. Maybe they would
begin to question the root of some of their ideas.
Blair didn't have time
to personally confront each of the several hundred thousand conservatives who
followed his Facebook page, so he'd built a community of more than 100 liberals
to police the page with him. Together they patrolled the comments, venting
their own political anger, shaming conservatives who had been fooled, taunting
them, baiting them into making racist comments that could then be reported to
Facebook. Blair said he and his followers had gotten hundreds of people banned
from Facebook and several others fired or demoted in their jobs for offensive
behaviour online. He had also forced Facebook to shut down 22 fake news sites
for plagiarizing his content, many of which were Macedonian sites that reran
his stories without labelling them as satire.
What Blair wasn't sure
he had ever done was change a single person's mind. The people he fooled often
came back to the page, and he continued to feed them the kind of viral content
that boosted his readership and his bank account: invented stories about Colin
Kaepernick, kneeling NFL players, imams, Black Lives Matter protesters,
immigrants, George Soros, the Clinton Foundation, Michelle and Malia Obama. He
had begun to include more obvious disclaimers at the top of every post and to
intentionally misspell several words in order to highlight the idiocy of his
work, but still, traffic continued to climb. Sometimes he wondered: Rather than
of awakening people to reality, was he pushing them further from it?
"Well, they never
did have any class," commented Shirley Chapian, from Pahrump, Nevada, and
Blair watched his liberal mob respond.
"That's kind of an
ironic comment coming from pure trailer trash, don't you think?"
"You're a gullible
moron who just fell for a fake story on a Liberal satire page"
 |
| Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg has faced enormous scrutiny this year over the use of his platform to spread false information. Photo/Getty Images. |
"What a waste of
flesh and time."
"Welcome to the
internet. Critical thinking required."
Chapian saw the
comments after her post and wondered as she often did when she was attacked:
Who were these people? And what were they talking about? Of course, Michelle
Obama and Chelsea Clinton had flipped off the president. It was true to what
she knew of their character. That was what mattered.
Instead of responding
directly to strangers on America's Last Line of Defense, Chapian wrote on her
own Facebook page. "Nasty liberals," she said, and then she went back
to her news feed, each day blending into the next.
A Muslim woman with her
burqa on fire: like. A policeman using a baton to beat a masked Antifa
protester: like. Hillary Clinton looking gaunt and pale: like. A military
helicopter armed with machine guns and headed toward the caravan of immigrants:
like.
She had spent a few
hours scrolling one afternoon when she heard a noise outside her window, and
she turned away from the screen to look outside. A neighbour was sweeping his
sidewalk, pushing tiny white rocks back into his rock garden. The sky was an
uninterrupted blue. A mailman worked his way up the empty street. There were no
signs of "Sharia Law." The migrant caravan was still hundreds of
miles away in Mexico. Antifa protesters had yet to descend on Pahrump. Chapian
squinted against the sun, closed the shades and went back to her screen.
A picture of
undocumented immigrants laughing inside a voting booth: like.
"Deep State Alive
and Well": like.
She scrolled upon
another post from America's Last Line of Defense, reading fast, oblivious to
the satire labels and not noticing Blair's trademark awkward phrasings and
misspellings. It showed a group of children kneeling on prayer mats in a
classroom. "California School children forced to Sharia in Class," it
read. "All of them have stopped eating bacon. Two began speaking in Allah.
Stop making children pray to imaginary Gods!!"
Chapian recoiled from
the screen. "Please!" she said. "If I had a kid in a school
system like that, I'd yank them out so fast."
She had seen hundreds
of stories on Facebook about the threat of sharia, and this confirmed much of
what she already believed. It was probably true, she thought. It was true
enough.
"Do people
understand that things like this are happening in this country?" she said.
She clicked the post and the traffic registered back to a computer in Maine,
where Blair watched another story go viral and wondered when his audience would
get his joke.
- Washington Post
Source: https://www.nzherald.co.nz/business/news/article.cfm?c_id=3&objectid=12162400&ref=NZH_fb
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