Zombies!

A trending topic today is a tweet by comic actor Bruce Campbell.  I hadn't seen the photos of the woman beaten by Sanders supporters at a Trump rally, probably because the online world is even more divided than the real world and I don't have any Facebook friends who support Donald Trump.  But Trump Universe was circulating this picture with great outrage and avidity.  The captions usually mocked liberals for their supposed non-violence: Look what these monsters did to this pretty blonde woman!

Bruce Campbell recognized the photo as being a test shot for makeup for his current TV show, Ash vs. Living Dead.  He called people on it, tweeting, "Check your facts, folks. This is an actress named Samara Weaving from #AshVsEvilDead. This is a makeup test. Sad."  I like how he got the hashtag plug for his show in there!  And then you look at the photo again and, wow, great lighting.  Great makeup, and not just the "injury."  This has got to be a better photo than an amateur could get on the spot to document some street horror.

The thing that really bothers me about it is that this is not a species of lie that is unique to Trump Bros or to the Right.  We are all so susceptible to believing a story that fits our desires and preconceptions that this kind of bullshit is propagated by social media regularly.

A year and a half ago, when the story of the abducted schoolgirls from Chibok was still relatively fresh in people's mind, this picture of armed African women circulated widely.  In the face of frustration with the Nigerian military's ongoing failure to save the girls from Boko Haram, this photo purportedly showed local women taking that fight into their own hands.  People, including me, were really excited to see this and to share it.

Unfortunately, that is not what it showed at all.  As I wrote at the time, the photo originally accompanied a two-year-old article on militias fighting Tuareg rebels in Mali, 1600 road miles, and a 36-hour drive from Chibok.  Even at the time I wasn't entirely sure what made me suspicious of the story.  And even when I reverse-searched the image through Google it took me a long time to find its original source, because -- of course -- the overwhelming majority of hits were from the popular current version of the story, which placed it in Borno State, Nigeria instead of two countries away.

I assume that all of us have had the experience of clicking on a link to a news aggregator to see some outrageous story (that confirms our worst suspicions) only to find that the actual details don't quite match the headline and that they are only relying on some other outlet that actually reported the story anyway.  This really is one definition of the term "clickbait" so it shouldn't surprise us much.  We bit on their gambit, they reported our hit to their advertisers, they made some money.

I see more to it, though.  First, pictures are very powerful and they don't speak for themselves.  So when we take a well-crafted photo and give it a totally new meaning the lie we have created is much more powerful.  Second -- clickbait aside -- we don't always even look at the story before sharing.  It is the image and the caption that are the "meme."  Finally, when the lie is political, it has consequences that last forever.

In September 1971 NY State Police retook Attica Correctional Facility from rebelling inmates.  The police killed 29 inmates and 9 corrections officers while they fired blindly into tear gas and smoke.  Governor Rockefeller and the newspapers reported that those corrections officers were murdered by inmates and that their throats were slit.  This was before the 24-hour news cycle and it wasn't until the next day that the truth began to slip out.  It was only later that surviving corrections officers were able to tell how their lives had been saved by inmates who covered them with their bodies.  It is now forty-five years since those terrible murders and there are still people who will insist that they saw those throats slit, despite the autopsy results!

It has been said that a lie can travel around the world while the truth is still lacing up its boots.  That quote has been variously attributed to Jonathan Swift, Mark Twain, Winston Churchill, Thomas Jefferson and a bunch of guys you never heard of.  I could, of course, make a PowerPoint slide with a picture of one of them and a text box with the quote.  I will try to restrain myself from adding to the flood of misinformation.