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(For those who are reading-challenged like me)

The Birth of a Fake Story

(TL;DR - the point is to stop reading headlines, so read the damn story)

On Christmas day I was watching A Christmas Story for the 143rd time. I turned the channel for a dose of reality and learned of the bombing in Nashville. Because it is 2020, I immediately thought to myself, “I wonder if this will be claimed to be a conspiracy related to the COVID vaccine, the election, or something new.” Being very active in the election process, I have tried to quell some of the more outlandish claims I have read. I will often illustrate the absurd with the absurd. With that in mind, I did the old “edit an old post” trick. I went back in my Facebook and edited a post from December 21. I changed the text to “Rumor is that AT&T got the contract to do the forensic audit on the Dominion machines. Many are being transported to the Nashville location this week. ..”

I’ve done this gag in the past and discovered my prank was easily foiled by someone clicking the option “edit history,” and it will show that I changed the text. So, I took a picture of my computer screen with my phone and then posted the picture of the post on my Facebook feed with only the word “Coincidence?” This created the illusion that four days prior to the bombing, I had heard the AT&T building may soon house the “controversial” voting machines.

Many of my friends who know my “sense of humor” and my frequent poking at silly conspiracy theories quickly knew this was just another one of my posts made to fill my time. What I did not anticipate was someone would take the post seriously and screenshot it himself/herself and post it on Twitter. That person apparently has a wide following in the world of election conspiracies. The Fake News was born.

A couple of hours later, a friend sent me a screenshot and said, “Your post is getting a lot of views on Twitter.” And it was.

People were replying, re-tweeting, liking, and even attempting to confirm the tweet. To be fair, there were numerous replies stating how this could have easily been edited, it is not verified, and/or it actually states, “Rumor is…” One even described the exact thing I had done. None of that mattered.

By the end of the day, the confirmation bias of the internet had created a truth. A “truth” that Dominion voting machines were in the building that was targeted. When I searched for my name on Twitter, I saw some crazy comments that had no basis in reality. One tweet said he confirmed that “Edward Jones is an IT Tech with AT&T.” Another tweet said they knew me personally and my post is “legit.” (I am not sure who that person was/is)

I was getting multiple private messages and new friend requests. I evaluated my options at the time. Do I make a new post and admit to my joke? Do I go back and “unedit” the post? A more responsible person may have done one of those options. I chose a third option. I chose to prove a point. I was comfortable with this path for several reasons. First, I never claimed to have firsthand knowledge of the event. It started with “rumor is…” It was the oldest trick in the “fake-post” book. But most importantly, it was not a post that would put anyone in danger, whether it was true or false. So I made one final post before going to bed. I posted that I was going to “hide” my original post and would be going out of town the next day. (I left out the fact the trip had been planned for months to visit family out of town). My real point of hiding the post was to prevent anymore sharing of the post. I wanted to see how far and wide the post would go after being on my page for less than 10 hours. It went far.

The next day, I discovered my name embedded in posts written in other languages. I found many posts with comments similar to “now that we know for a fact that the voting machines were in the building…” My “rumor is…” had evolved into “it is undisputed.” People were tagging Attorney Lin Wood. Several shared my post to the FBI. Again, to be fair, there were plenty of comments showing the red flags of my post. But even some of those were the result of the same confirmation bias. For instance, many were commenting, “This cannot be true, I cannot find this Edward Jones on Twitter, where is the @ symbol by his name? This is clearly fake.” Replies to those types of comments correctly pointed out the original post was from Facebook, not Twitter.

But in all of the posts, re-tweets, community comments, etc., not once did a real news source make any similar claim. Not a single Google search yielded any stories about AT&T working on any voting machines. Literally not one shred of even the slightest corroboration could be found anywhere on the interwebs. But the sharing, the discussions, and the claims continued.

Some people tried to appear skeptical but at the same time contributed to the problem. The classic sharing of the post with the comment, “I have not yet verified this, but…”or “I don’t know this guy, but I guess it is possible…” Would we accept our kids telling us “I’ve not yet confirmed it, but I have straight A’s this semester?” Of course not. Yet, many who saw such posts re-tweeted the original post.

By 9:00 p.m. on the 26th, less than 36 hours since I made the post, Twitter’s search would auto-fill “Edward Jones Tweet” and “Edward Jones AT&T” after typing “Ed” in the search bar. #EdwardJones had not taken off, but several posts started using that hashtag. My personal favorite was “#EdwardJones did not kill himself.”

Confirmation bias is a serious problem within social media. The inability and/or unwillingness of people to do a simple search to verify stories is a real problem. Even if one believes a certain newspaper or station is “too liberal” or “too conservative.” it cannot be disputed their reporting of the facts is virtually impeccable. If any company was awarded the contract to audit voting machines, SOME newspaper or network would have at least a blurb about it. I am not smart enough to offer the reader a solution to this problem. Apparently, my only contribution to this plague is to inadvertently discover/create a case study for someone else to study. But it concerns this writer and it should concern us all. Not everything can be a conspiracy, yet there are people who genuinely believe most things are. If people are willing to believe any post confirming their position, their conspiracy will become their reality. Society cannot thrive with millions of different realities.

To the hundreds of new followers and Facebook friends who came to me believing that I have inside secrets about the auditing of voting machines, I apologize. I hope everyone who accepted my post as the truth will henceforth think twice before blindly accepting such a vague statement. I hope everyone will do some level of investigating before proceeding based on some random comment from a stranger. To paraphrase something I heard as a kid, if we will take the time to confirm a “Wet Paint” sign, let’s try to verify whether or not that post you like is real.

Edward Jones, J.D.
Ringgold, GA