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Please Don’t Believe What I Said Because I Said So
An experiment in fake news
Last fall I took a college class on mass communications. 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:
The results? Grim.
I tracked the responses to this piece across several social media platforms and in the comments 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…
