What's black and white and red all over?
Answer: the Internet.
The greatest medium for the spreading of hoaxes ever created. The most recent example is the Dartmouth student who claimed that DHS had investigated him because he had requested a copy of Mao's little red book.
Well, it wasn't true. Lots of people believed it, including Senator Kennedy, (in the interests of objectivity, I did too). Many of us wanted to believe ill of DHS anyway, so this didn't seem like a stretch.
Good hoaxes start with something that maybe hasn't happened, but could have, a kernel of believability. Drop this grain of truth into a distribution medium and step back and watch it spread.
I wondered if this effect would be triggered off during the last election, but outside of one phake photoshop pic of Kerry--nothing.
I suspect that this time will be different. This hoax spread too easily and even though it would have been simple for reporters to debunk (and it was), this didn't curtail its reach. When you have a highly contested, wide-open contest like the 2008 presidential election with literally tens of billions of special interest dollars riding on the outcome, expect some chicanery. More to come on this topic later.
Posted on January 04, 2006
