Believing Fake News Stories

[Hyena Dandy]

Okay, I love The Onion. I love a lot of sites like that. I love a good bit of satire, whether it's the Onion's good-natured ribbing of normal news set-ups, to the more biting "Christwire" style of things.

But I'm starting to get really pissed off at the number of times that people cite them as fact.

When it's something that doesn't hurt anyone, okay, no worries. When someone cites something like this article

http://www.theonion.com/articles/com...t-drunk,32628/

I can pretty much laugh it off. It's silly.

But when people are using it in debate, it gets really fucking annoying. Like the number of times I've had to explain to people that, whether you think her view on guns is right or not, Diane Feinstein did not urge people to disarm because “When the gunman realizes that nobody else is armed, he will lay down his weapons and turn himself in…. that’s just human nature.”

Or the fact that I had to explain today that

http://tribuneherald.net/2013/06/26/...urbation-bill/

That's not actually a real story, several times.

I wish people would actually read these articles. Because they're pretty obviously fake.

[siead_lietrathua]

problem is, there are some people out there that just don't get that it's fake. so then you end up arguing with idiots. and you never win an argument with an idiot, they just keep going until your brain BSODs and you end up an idiot too.

[violiav]

Yeah, there's a photo going around Facebook with that on it. I commented,"She never really said that. Ever." someone replied,"it doesn't matter if she really said it. It sounds real."
Arrg! Heaven forbid liberals spread around false quotes.

[Andara Bledin]

...someone replied,"it doesn't matter if she really said it. It sounds real."

And... anyone who says that sounds like an idiot.

I've run into those people. I call them out on being dipshits. Not quite in those terms, but I let everyone else know how stupid that really is.

[HYHYBT]

Yeah, there's a photo going around Facebook with that on it. I commented,"She never really said that. Ever." someone replied,"it doesn't matter if she really said it. It sounds real."
Arrg! Heaven forbid liberals spread around false quotes.

The preference for truthiness over truth crosses all political divides.

Now, the other thing is that the best spoof stories are those which are close enough to the truth, or at least are consistent enough with things which really are true, that it really *is* hard to tell.

[ThePhoneGoddess]

I get a lot of enjoyment out of the following site:

http://literallyunbelievable.org/

Tagline says "Stories from The Onion as interpreted by Facebook."

It's nothing but posts by people who think some Onion story they've come across is real. It makes me laugh very much at human gullibility.

[Tanasi]

Several years ago at a gun show in VA a guy passed out flyers to the dealers for a new type of sights for pistols that fit either the left or right side of the slide so the shooter would have sights when shooting gangster style (sideways.) Some how a few of these flyers made to the the city council who in a faux-rage brought it up at the next meeting and officially wanted these sights banned for numerous reasons but mostly because this was a racially directed product. It was quickly pointed out that the flyer is fake and it says so on said flyer.

One time my wife's youngest brother sent a link to his mother saying that from now on all women that were doing the news on TV had to be nude. She fell for it hook,line and sinker, she even fired off a letter to the local wrapper's editor that was published in the Sunday paper. She felt quite the fool when she discovered that she had been duped.