Side Note

How much we love fake news, visualized

The Outline has written before about how fake news travels faster than real news; we’ve always suspected it, but now that everything plays out in measurable units known as “tweets” and “Facebook posts,” we can really, really prove humanity’s propensity for foisting bullshit onto our friends.

In case you did not already believe this, simply cannot wrap your head around the idea that the problem could be that bad, the graph above from Lawfare just might do the trick. As you can see, in the hours following tweets about a man in Toronto ramming a truck into pedestrians, the tweet where the driver was “wide-eyed, angry, and Middle Eastern” took off, while the tweet from an hour later saying the driver was white and that the attack was deliberate terrorism scrapes the bottom of the axes. Even 24 hours later, the truth never even remotely caught up to the lie:

The true tweet, still lying there even 24 hours after the fact.

The true tweet, still lying there even 24 hours after the fact.

Of course, this post being true, it will do no traffic. No matter; I will die poor and right.