Two Truths and a Lie

I was on vacation last week. It was a wonderful time filled with sand, way-too-cold ocean water, s’mores, and snuggles. Intentionally, I only did a couple hours of work coming up with blog ideas. Over coffee while staring at the ocean before my family woke up, I wrote three ideas for blog posts and outlined them. I sat down to finish one of them today and realized that just about anything I wrote would be tone-deaf given the events of last week and the ongoing anxiety around the peaceful transition of power in the U.S. Instead, I wrote, rewrote, trashed, restarted, and rewrote this blog several times over.

One of my personal values is to be genuine. I don’t want to maintain a Work Dave persona different from Facebook Dave, LinkedIn/Corporate Dave, or Dad Dave. While I considered not writing this, ultimately I decided this is me, it’s my blog, and I want people to know exactly who I am. What follows is not a discussion about party or policy, although I’d happily entertain a civil debate with you over a cold Topo Chico. I am not going to change your political persuasion via this blog, a Facebook post, or a LinkedIn post asking you to “give a like and a share if you’re a real {enter word your side values here}.” This is a discussion about truth and lies.

Let’s start with some intentionally simplistic examples.

“The sun came up this morning.” Truth.

“Today’s sunrise was not as beautiful as yesterday’s.” Opinion.

“When the sun came up this morning, it was shaped like an upside-down crucifix and Black Sabbath was playing out of nowhere. The end is near, buy gold, finish up the bunker.” Obviously, this last example is blatantly false and you needn’t fact check it. If you find something like this on a fiction or parody site, then it can be called fantasy and we can all get a good laugh. If someone is trying to pass this off to you as an actual occurrence, it’s called a lie. It’s not a half-truth or a biased spin; it’s a lie.

I was looking at my LinkedIn feed this morning and saw that a friend had interacted with an article about a high-ranking military person “owning” Speaker Pelosi. I immediately knew it wasn’t true based on the portion I could read, but figured I’d click to see just how ridiculous the story was. To this point, I have mostly been reading articles about these types of pieces and have not been reading the pieces themselves. If I am to believe this piece {of fiction}, a general officer told Speaker Pelosi, “Otherwise, I suggest you listen really hard to the words escaping your cracked, poisonous lips; they’re tantamount to treason.” If I was 99% sure it was false before, I was now 109% sure it was false. But, pray tell, who broke this hard hitting story? “A Pentagon source speaking under promise of anonymity told -- website intentionally removed by me-- that Pelosi contacted Gen. --name intentionally omitted by me-- late Monday night.” Not even an “I was in the room,” or, “I was on the conference call.” I Googled the topic to see if something even remotely similar happened that has been spun wildly out of control, and what popped up? A YouTube video of a guy (perhaps the author of the article) reading the article out loud, verbatim from the website, presumably to give credence to the article that was garbage in the first place. I also found this information on another website claiming to report the news other media won’t. And it’s source? The initial website where this all began.

You’re about to stop reading, thinking “This is dumb. I get it. We’ve all seen “The Social Dilemma” and know by now that we’re getting served up digital-Pepsi or digital-Coke depending on our preference. OBVIOUSLY, no one thinks this stuff is real.” Oh? On LinkedIn, the post that led me down this rabbit hole has 259 thumbs up, 19 celebrates, and 18 hearts by at least some who I can attest are real humans. On Twitter, this same post has been retweeted 1.2k times and has 2.1k likes. Comments range from, “She committed a seditious act” to “Hell yeah!!!” to “I despise her, but there is no way a Marine officer would address her like that.” Hey, at least one person insinuated that there was, at a minimum, false information in this report. In and of itself this may be a trivial example, but the cumulative effect of false information and lies is the further erosion of our collective ability to tell fact from poorly written fiction. A recent study at MIT found that “False news stories are 70% more likely to be retweeted than true stories are. It also takes true stories about six times as long to reach 1,500 people as it does for false stories to reach the same number of people.”1 In the study, they controlled for bots and found that it was in fact humans spreading the false information.

“So what, Dave? Do you want me to believe that your side is right and for me to only accept news and information that you and the rest of your side’s media say is true?” I don’t want you to believe anything I say outright. Hell, a month ago I mistook pressure washer cleaning fluid for windshield wiper fluid and didn’t notice until I was two hours into a three-hour drive! (They’re both blue). I am not calling for regulation, condemnation, or cancelation. I am reaching out as a human, to implore other humans to:

Educate yourself. Ignorance is no excuse. Read and listen to a wide array of news across the spectrum. The world of real, factual, verifiable information is literally at your fingertips. If you do not intend to do that because you don’t trust generally-accepted news outlets for whatever reason, at least do a cursory amount of research on the organization(s) from which you are obtaining your news. Has anyone else reported on this? Is this a report or an editorial/opinion piece? If this pundit/news outlet were sued, would the defense be, “My client’s comments are for opinion and entertainment purposes only and cannot be held liable for things they say”? If something is real, impactful, and/or salacious, every news outlet across the spectrum would want to publish it regardless of how they choose to spin the story because it gets eyeballs. Keep Occam’s razor in mind.
Don’t spread it. You control whether or not the lies perpetuate. Always assume that there is someone, somewhere not as mentally stable as you that is going to read what you created/liked/shared/retweeted and take it as true because you authored or endorsed it. Yes, he or she would ultimately be responsible for their resulting actions but you may have thrown the exact match that starts the forest fire. #gateofpizza
Call it out. I believe it is all of our responsibility in this day and age to politely say, “That’s not real. Why are you spreading that?” Taking this simple action is not getting political or starting a fight and, furthermore, doesn’t require a complete renunciation of your friendship or familial bonds. Whether in your organization, your friend circle, or your church group, it is your responsibility as a leader and as a citizen to do your part to rebuild the fabric of truth in our society that we seem intent on ripping to shreds.

I will now go back to my coffee, and my next blog will return to one of the stories I dreamt up while at the beach, I promise. Ah, but before I go, my two truths and a lie. Let’s see if you CaN FiGuR3 IT 0uT!

QAnon is fake.
QAnon is real.
QAnon is fake.

1Dizikes, P. (2018, March 8). Study: On Twitter, false news travels faster than true stories. News.Mit.Edu. https://news.mit.edu/2018/study-twitter-false-news-travels-faster-true-stories-0308