Craig Silverman, media editor of Buzzfeed, was showing a picture of an ABC News article recently to a crowd at the University of Chicago’s International House Assembly Hall. The headline read “Donald Trump Protester Speaks Out: ‘I Was Paid $3,500 To Protest Trump’s Rally.'” It looked official enough. That is, until the audience began to notice things like the ABC logo font in Arial, the odd kerning, the fact that paid protesting really isn’t a thing, and finally, the author’s name—”Jimmy Rustling,” a nod to the popular 4chan meme, “That Really Rustled My Jimmies.”
The fake story about a paid protester that Silverman led off with might have just languished in Facebook and Twitter feeds far from the gaze of journalists and the political class if not for two people—Corey Lewandowski and Kellyanne Conway, seeming to take the piece as fact, had both tweeted the story out to their huge numbers of followers. It’s a narrative that’s become familiar at this point, and Silverman stressed the real concern: “This is really important for misinformation,” he said. “When people in positions of power and authority share it, and put it out there, it adds to its perception of credibility.”
At one point, Silverman brought up the Sun, a now-defunct New York City broadsheet that at one point coexisted with the New York Times in the mid-1800s. An early benefactor of the “penny press,” which made it cheaper to print papers and thus led to the rise of mass media, the Sun also took advantage of another trick that Silverman described as “just print crazy shit.” This included a six-part series about an explorer who had seen what was on the moon . . . and found it to be filled with a species that was half man and half bat.
“The last big one is the social network platforms and algorithmic filtering. I don’t think Facebook had any idea that a lot of stuff that was false and misleading was getting as much traction as it was—their platform is so big it’s impossible to monitor it at that level. Same with Google.”
