Gale

2013 :The Year we Broke The Internet

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s winter storms were buffeting parts of the country last week, our collective attention was drawn halfway around the world to Egypt. Images of the pyramids and the Sphinx covered in snow had emerged, and were being shared tens of thousands of times on Facebook and Twitter. It wasn’t hard to see why. For some, sharing the photos was a statement on global warming. For others, sharing was about the triumph of discovery, making them proud housecats dropping a half-chewed mouse of news on the Internet’s doorstep. For most, however, the photos were just another thoughtlessly processed and soon-forgotten item that represented our now-instinctual response to the unrelenting stream of information we’re subjected to every waking hour: Share first, ask questions later. Better yet: Let someone else ask the questions. Better still: What was the question again?Needless to say, the photos were bullshit.

It’s hard not to note the tidy symbolism here. The Internet, like the Sphinx, is a ravenous beast that eats alive anyone who can’t answer its hoary riddle. We in the media have been struggling for twenty years to solve that riddle, and this year, the answer arrived: Big Viral, a Lovecraftian nightmare that has tightened its thousand-tentacled grip on our browsing habits with its traffic-at-all-costs mentality—veracity, newsworthiness, and relevance be damned. We solved the riddle, and then we got eaten anyway.

One of these isn’t real.

The Egypt photos weren’t the only viral hoax to hijack the social media conversation in the past month. Of the others, the most infamous was reality-TV producer Elan Gale’s in-flight pissing match with a fellow passenger, which he documented on Twitter, and which was shepherded along by BuzzFeed to the delight of hundreds of thousands of onlookers. That it was actually a prank rankled some, but even that turned out to be a boon for the sites that shared it: They got the clicks coming and going, both on the ramp-up and in the reveal. The story may well have been, in the words of Slate’s Dave Weigel, “the sort of shoddy reporting that would get a reporter at a small newspaper fired,” but it was also a perfect microcosm of the way the Internet works now.

“We’re not in the business of publishing hoaxes,” BuzzFeed’s news editor wrote in response to Weigel’s piece, “and we feel an enormous responsibility here to provide our readers with accurate, up-to-date information”—which sounds a bit like Altria’s health inspector saying they’re sorry they gave you cancer.

The fact is, that sort of double-dipping is what most of us who produce Internet content do, myself included. Give me the viral pictures, and I’ll give you the truth. And then, after an appropriate waiting period, I’ll give you the other truth, and capitalize on that traffic too. It’s almost a perfect callback to William Randolph Hearst’s infamous declaration on the eve of the Spanish-American War, “You furnish the pictures and I’ll furnish the war.” Even more fitting, historians don’t think he ever said anything like that. Then as now, it’s the myth that plays, not the reality. Today it just plays on an exponentially larger stage.

The media has long had its struggles with the truth—that’s nothing new. What is new is that we’re barely even apologizing for increasingly considering the truth optional. In fact, the mistakes, and the falsehoods, and the hoaxes are a big part of a business plan driven by the belief that big traffic absolves all sins, that success is a primary virtue. Haste and confusion aren’t bugs in the coding anymore, they’re features. Consider what Ryan Grim, Washington bureau chief for the Huffington Post, told The New York Times in its recent piece on a raft of hoaxes, including Gale’s kerfuffle, a child’s letter to Santa that included a handwritten Amazon URL, and a woman who wrote about her fictitious poverty so effectively that she pulled in some $60,000 in online donations. “The faster metabolism puts people who fact-check at a disadvantage,” Grim said. “If you throw something up without fact-checking it, and you’re the first one to put it up, and you get millions and millions of views, and later it’s proved false, you still got those views. That’s a problem. The incentives are all wrong.”

In other words, press “Publish” or perish.

nd so, to our year of bungles: the New Jersey waitress who received a homophobic comment on the receipt from a party she had served; comedian Kyle Kinane’s Twitter beef with Pace Salsa; the Chinese husband who sued his wife for birthing ugly children after he learned she’d had plastic surgery; Samsung paying Apple $1 billion in nickels; former NSA chief Michael Hayden’s assassination; #CutForBieber; the exquisite, otherwordly weirdness of the @Horse_ebooks Twitter account; Nelson Mandela’s death pic; that eagle snatching a child off the ground on YouTube; Jimmy Kimmel’s “twerk fail” video; Sarah Palin taking a job with Al-Jazeera America (an obviously satirical story that even suckered in The Washington Post)…

These all had one thing in common: They seemed too tidily packaged, too neat, “too good to check,” as they used to say, to actually be true. Any number of reporters or editors at any of the hundreds of sites that posted these Platonic ideals of shareability could’ve told you that they smelled, but in the ongoing decimation of the publishing industry, fact-checking has been outsourced to the readers. Not surprisingly—as we saw with the erroneous Reddit-spawned witch-hunt around the Boston Marathon bombing—readers are terrible at fact-checking. And this, as it happens, is good for business because it means more shares, more clicks.

This is not a glitch in the system. It is the system. Readers are gullible, the media is feckless, garbage is circulated around, and everyone goes to bed happy and fed. BuzzFeed’s Jonah Peretti admitted as much when explaining, that, when he’s hiring, he looks for “people who really understand how information is shared on Twitter and Facebook and Instagram and other emerging platforms, because that is in some cases as important as, you know, having traditional reporting talent.” Upworthy editorial director Sara Critchfield seconded the notion. “We reject the idea that the media elite or people who have been trained in a certain way somehow have the monopoly on editorial judgment.”

That mastery of social media platforms is imperative, because this was the year someone isolated the DNA of the viral story, and the world—hearts full of wonder, hope, and maybe a little fear—saw for the first time the awesome potential of viral content. Earlier this month, NewsWhip posted statistics about the most frequently shared sites online. Among the more revealing graphs was one tabulating Facebook shares per article by domain. The leader, Upworthy, had about seventy-five thousand likes per article, twelve times more than fourth-place BuzzFeed. Among them were posts like the one whose headline misleadingly claimed doctors were injecting HIV into a dying girl to treat her cancer.

It worked. Upworthy is now “so much more dominant than other news sites on Facebook,”wrote The Atlantic’s Derek Thompson, “that when you graph its Facebook-shares-per-article, it looks like a skyscraper dropped into a desert.”

To be more specific, it looks like the original skyscraper in the original desert. Like our forebears, we too speak a common tongue in erecting our Tower of Babel, but ours is language of shares and clicks and uniques. Gaze upon our collected works and despair.

On second thought, don’t despair. It’s bad for shareability.

y hands are certainly not clean in all this. While I’ve primarily made my living as a (mostly) upstanding freelancer for dailies, weeklies, and glossies for a decade or so, like many others, I’ve also had to moonlight as a content generator for a wide array of websites—some high-minded and journalistic, others less so. I typically publish about twenty-five pieces a week, from reported features, to tossed-off reaction blogs, and the churn-and-burn pace of daily writing has lead to my passing along some pretty sketchy nonsense this past year—from the pastor who stiffed an Applebee’s waitress, to Lars von Trier’s Nymphomaniac trailer being accidentally shown to a roomful of kids waiting for a Disney movie, to the comedian who live-tweeted a breakup on an apartment roof, to any number of speculative gossip pieces about Amanda Bynes, Kanye West, Miley Cyrus, et al., which I often didn’t bother to double-check before firing off. Why did I do it? Because I knew everyone else was going to, and I wanted to siphon off the traffic. Like buying into an insurance plan, it’s a pooled-risk version of Internet writing: The sheer ubiquity of suspect stories provides cover for all of us.

Perhaps worse, I’m ashamed to say, I sometimes like it. Watching the social media shares multiply exponentially on something I posted triggers the pleasure center of the brain like a stiff rip of cocaine. The opposite is true as well. When I file a piece I like and no one shares it, I sink into a serotonin-deficit that’s hard to climb out of.

Media malpractice like this didn’t trigger the collapse of traditional revenue models, but it’s hastening the job. Everyone wants everything for free now—news, music, movies, etc.—which means the companies don’t have any money to pay people to produce original work. None of this is anything you haven’t heard before, but it bears repeating. In order to make a living, those of us who had the bad sense to shackle ourselves to a career in media before that world ended have to churn out more content faster than ever to make up for the drastically reduced pay scale. We’re left with the choice of spending a week reporting a story we’re actually proud of (as I do just frequently enough to ensure a somewhat restful sleep every other night), reaping a grand sum of somewhere in the ballpark of two hundred to five hundred dollars if we’re lucky, or we can grind out ten blog posts at twenty-five to fifty bucks a pop that take fifteen minutes each. That means the work across the board ends up being significantly more disposable, which in turn makes the readers value it less, which means they want to pay less for it, and so on. It’s an ouroboros of shit.

Among all the things I’ve written this year, the ones that took the least amount of time and effort usually did the most traffic. The more in-depth, reported pieces didn’t stand a chance against riffs on things predestined to go viral. That’s the secret that Upworthy, BuzzFeed, MailOnline, Viral Nova, and their dozens of knockoffs have figured out: You don’t need to write anymore—just write a good headline and point. If what you’re pointing at turns out to be a steaming turd, well, then repackage the steam and sell it back to us.

This conflation of newsiness with news, share-worthiness with importance, has wreaked havoc on the media’s skepticism immune systems. It didn’t happen out of nowhere, it’s a process that’s been midwifed by the willful blurring of the lines between fact and fiction on the part of a key group of influential sites, that have, unfortunately, established a viable financial model amid the wreckage of traditional media. It’s why companies are so eager to shuffle native ads—content produced to appear as if it were a site’s regular content—into the regular mix. They’re hoping we won’t know the difference. They’re right, we often don’t. That’s part of the reason native advertising revenues are up 77 percent this year, according to a new study by BIA/Kelsey. There are practically no consequences anymore.

s Big Viral gets bigger, traditional media organizations are scrambling to keep pace. We’re seeing the BuzzFeedification of the entire spectrum of the media—even The New York Times isn’t immune anymore, having recently inked a content-sharing deal with BuzzFeed (it was reportedly theTimes’ idea). You won’t find a major publication without a section on its site devoted to sharing questionable viral content. It’s been particularly disheartening to watch Gawker, a site I’ve read every day for years (and, disclosure: submitted a piece to recently), home to many fine, skeptical cranks, slouch into the viral morass. This magazine’s website has posted some goofy stuff too. I’m sorry, but it has. They all have.

“This isn’t a new model in journalism,” the Wall Street Journal’s Farhad Manjoo noted in his profile of Gawker’s Neetzan Zimmerman, reigning king of viral content. “Bundling the cheap, revenue-generating content with expensive, high-minded content is how newspapers made money for decades—but it has now become the touchstone model of the Web, in use at Gawker, BuzzFeed, the Huffington Post, and dozens of smaller sites.”

This is a common refrain—Yeah, but they do some good long-form journalism. And it’s true, I’ve read some good reporting out there—but on the other hand, after the Army blows up a village they come back around with a couple of sacks of rice to smooth over the damage. The fact is, you cannot justify quality reporting produced from the spoils of the opposite. Journalism does not provide for such leeway. It’s better for a hundred quality stories to go unposted than to let one knowingly false one see the light of day. At the risk of sounding like the boy who cried click-bait, I’m warning you: One of these days a viral hoax is going to come along that we really should pay attention to, and our guards will be down because we’ve become conditioned to lump all information together into the LOL and #feelings files. And one of these days a fake news story is going to have some serious real world consequences too, something like San Francisco elementary school that was widely attacked by people who’d mistook a satirical article in National Report about a student who was suspended for wishing a Merry Christmas to an atheist teacher.

As much as media companies might want to erect barriers between their entertainment and news sides (as Fox News often claims about their editorializing hosts), the average reader or viewer doesn’t register any meaningful distinction between BuzzFeed News and BuzzFeed WTF, or whatever the fck it is, or the Huffington Post’s front page and its “30 Racist Side Boobs” slideshow. This becomes even more convoluted when a story goes viral and it’s received with not only the imprimatur of the site of origin, but also the thousands and thousands of implicit endorsements by the people who deigned to share it. When it finds its way to us, we think, There it is in my feed, my newsfeed—next to ostensibly reliable accounts from The New York Times, the BBC, and others—and we consume.

Yes, newspapers have long printed lifestyle puff pieces next to hard news, but the analogy between that practice and the current model doesn’t hold. As someone who’s written hundreds of newspaper entertainment pieces in my day, I can tell you they still, thankfully, do not take inaccuracies lightly, even minor ones. And as someone who’s written hundreds of hacky blog posts, I can tell you that it’s a practice that rots your guts from inside. Trust me.

Actually, don’t trust me—that’s the entire point. We the media have betrayed your trust, and the general public has taken our self-sanctioned lowering of standards as tacit permission to lower their own.

That may sound fatalistic, but I say this because I love the Internet, not because I hate it. No one is suggesting we need to drain all of the fun out of everything—diversions are a huge part of what make the vast teeming wonder of the web such a joy to behold. But there’s an infinite expanse of information about things that actually exist out there just waiting for us to share them. Why would we take that wealth for granted and resort to passing along things we know—or can easily find—to be false?

Like Odysseus, we’ve plowed our field with salt (to use another example of over-reported fiction). If you remember the myth, he was pretending to be insane to get out of an oath he’d made, now that it was inconvenient and not in his interest. It wasn’t until Palamedes placed his beloved son in front of the plow that Odysseus came to his senses and remembered he had something to fight for.

58 commentsSocial RankingChronologicalReverse Chronological

  • Michael J Schumacher · Follow ·  Top Commenter · Owner at Smoke N Stuff/Allsmoke

    Here, have another shot of ego-crack. Just shared on my FB. This was beautifully and wonderfully done. From now on every time I see a news story in my feed, I’m gonna have to say “wow, what if that were true!” and then link this particular article. I’d accuse you of turning me into a heartless cynic, but I think I always had it in me after discovering Straight Dope and Snopes nigh-on 20 years ago.

    • Kurt Gulman · Concord, New Hampshire

      I use my intuition generally, and it seemed very thoughtful (I know your comment was tongue in cheek), but honestly as a rule of thumb (maybe a vague attempt at nobility) II try to take everything seriously (and am very gullable as a result)
      Reply · 1 · Like · December 28 at 4:39pm

  • James Papadopoulos · School of Visual Arts

    Superbly written article with a clear message and well thought out examples to prove a point. The problem as I see it: people on the internet, like in real life, are mostly stupid. It really IS just that simple. With the state of the media today, media consumers are encouraged to aim lower, not higher. Even I, while reading this article, was wondering “how long IS this thing? It’s interesting and I agree with all he’s saying… but what’s on my DVR?”. Keep up the good fight, Luke O’Neil, wherever you are.

  • Christopher Sessums · Follow

    As a classroom educator, I love viral media! When students and I stumble on a “big” story, we get a chance to put our heads together, ask pertinent questions, do a little fact checking. This in turn allows us to evaluate the reliability and credibility of different information sources. Viral media is the best “hook” in the world for teaching students how to read critically. To news sources, bloggers, hype machines, I say “Bring the noise!”

    • John Isaacson · Follow · Comics Instructor at Portland Community College

      As someone who is new to this, I’m curious about how you check facts. Do you go to the same sources to check your facts or use different sources each time? I’m a teacher too and would love to see some lesson plans about checking facts. Students need it more than ever these days (especially in middle school where rumors run rampant.)
      Reply · 4 · Like · December 27 at 8:06pm

    • Michele Horaney ·  Top Commenter · University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

      Mr. Sessums, you are a very good teacher and your students/pupils are very fortunate to have you leading them in critical thinking. There’s far too little of that going around these days. Keep up your good work and don’t stop!
      Reply · Like · December 28 at 8:37pm

  • Tim Horacek · Attiswil, Switzerland

    Well written and thought provoking means that sadly, it’ll probably never go viral.

    • Earnest Pettie ·  Top Commenter · University of Oklahoma

      I disagree. A well-written and thoughtful piece can go viral for the very reasons the fluff goes viral. People want to attach themselves to an idea. So they may like, share, reshare, and tweet without ever having read the piece.
      Reply · 9 · Like · December 26 at 9:19pm

  • Andrew Wilmington · Follow · Research Assistant at Murphy lab

    Great article, thanks for putting in the time to write this. You raise some great points about a trend that I’ve felt in my gut, but never got to the point of articulating out loud.

    • Kurt Gulman · Concord, New Hampshire

      I felt the same way, it is like he said that many of us were either inexperienced enough with how this industry worked nor confident enough to share these concerns!
      Reply · Like · December 28 at 4:41pm

  • Dane Rauschenberg · Portland, Oregon

    Well-put. AND I have to look up “ouroboros”.

  • Tom Hunter ·  Top Commenter · Binghamton

    No one “broke” the internet. It isn’t like any INTELLIGENT people pay any real attention to blogs to begin with. Not one person with a functioning brain cares what Buzzfeed has ever said, for example. For these very reasons. IT isn’t as if this is the first year that crappy blogs have posted stories without doing even the slightest about of verification.

  • Janice Borgwardt · Follow · President at Videotique- Tailored Productions

    The web exponentially increases human interaction, to include lies, gossip, misinformation and manipulation. Dishonesty will flourish in direct proportion to the number of dishonest people posting. I agree that true journalists can no longer keep up, when so many of their ranks have sold out to the PR machine, which effectively uses journalistic weapons to keep real journalists mostly in the dark. To change this, the money motive must go. The public interest needs government funding and true accountability, and perhaps even the tools now in use by the NSA!

  • Christopher Hyde · Smithy at Joe’s Blacksmith Shoppe

    when the legend becomes fact, tweet the legend

  • Samuel Smith · Follow · Copywriter at Williams Helde

    Imagine a world with me. It’s the world where net neutrality has ended. Stay with me now, this is the solution to all our problems. This puts an END to ALL the “42 dogs that look like actors” posts that clutter up my Internet.Imagine a second Internet, an Internet where you pay per hit rather than being paid per hit. Because bandwidth costs money, there’s a monetary equation to solve before just “pressing publish.” You’ll still make money from great content like this, because advertisers will WANT to be next to it. You’ll actually make LESS if you can create something viral, because a piece of content’s worth will be judged, not by the number of eyeballs it reaches, and not by the number of people who click on an advertisement, but on the attributed brand value that a brand earns by being placed next to it.Whole swaths of d…See More

    • Jacqueline McGee Smith ·  Top Commenter

      Until people can’t afford to pay for the ‘good content,’ and you realize that much like reality television killing off scripted writing, pay per clicks will generate more and more of the dumbed down distractions our more ignorant masses love to glob onto. Are you a corporate shill? My apologies if you’re not- but they’re the only ones that will win if we lose net neutrality. Or did that never occur to you?
      Reply · Like · about an hour ago

  • Matt DeCaro · St. Joseph’s Prep

    I’m OK with getting some inaccurate info from the net – I can sort it out. I find it preferable to getting one sided information from the ‘respected’ outlets. Look for example at the New York Times reporting on communism many years ago by Walter Duranty, and almost anything about Obama’s administration – pre filtered by the NYT so they won’t give us info we can’t ‘properly digest and contextualize’ – i.e. the truth.

  • Billy Shearer

    Great article and I was taken in by the ‘plane flight Twitter article between Elan Gale and “Diane.”Is it dangerous? I think so – just like we have a generation of people thinking that some bogey man put razor blades on a children’s slide (never happened); or the new drug craze that’s hitting your primary school, it’s the power to control peoples outlook on life that is scary. So far the hoaxes have been fairly harmless, what happens when someone posts a picture of “Diane” to this gullible audience?
    Reply · 1 · Like · Follow Post · 12 hours ago

  • Morna Crites-Moore · Follow ·  Top Commenter · Visit my FB Page at at Morna Crites-Moore

    C’mon … We’ve always had “media malpractice.” Now it’s just bigger and better – and way more fun. If you’re looking for truth, don’t look on Facebook and Twitter and whatever else Mr. O’Neil is in a tizzy about. Or maybe he just hit on a trendy topic to further his freelance career. The internet is a very big place … and it is awesome. Want accurate medical information? Go to mayoclinic or webmd. Want to know more about art? How about history, culture, food, social issues, and way, way more. There are so many fascinating, informative sites in Web Land; it’s the most spectacular museum in the universe. What’s more, we are witnessing amazing political shifts and populist movements made possible, in large part, due to the existence of the internet. The people of the world are actually getting to know each other. When I am on the internet I am a voracious seeker, discovering myriad fascinating people, places and things. I admit that I spend too much time in this one realm, at the expense of other, undoubtedly healthier venues – like places where one can interact with other humans in the flesh (imagine!). And, generally speaking, I probably forget 80% or more of the “fascinating” information I glean at 2 am, when I’d be better off getting some sleep. But if it weren’t for my habit of wandering around the www, I wouldn’t be able to share such links as this: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/12/26/calvin-and-hobbes-snowmen_n_4498318.html

    • Lindsay Elizabeth Aspin · Rutgers

      i feel like you’re missing a central point.. we have more access to current events now online, not just text facts that you’d find in an encyclopedia. and the fake events on facebook are being repeated on “actual” news sites. i think is more of the issue.
      Reply · 3 · Like · December 28 at 12:24am

    • Morna Crites-Moore · Follow ·  Top Commenter · Visit my FB Page at at Morna Crites-Moore

      Lindsay Elizabeth Aspin That is why I referred to “amazing political shifts and populist movements” and noted that the people of the world “are actually getting to know each other.” The access to current events – not just as observers but also as participants – is a key reason why I love the internet. If “actual” news sites want to maintain their standing, then they’d better be more careful about what they print. Isn’t that kind of the point? Conventional wisdom holds that the internet can’t be trusted and that only those “actual” news sites are to be believed because they hire “real” journalists and do a proper job of checking the facts. I say the emperor has no clothes and traditional journalism has its own guilty secrets. Selling advertising under the guise of journalism has always been problematical – and not just in the rea…See More
      Reply · 1 · Like · Edited · December 28 at 12:33am

    • Martyn Cornell · University of West London

      “maybe he just hit on a trendy topic to further his freelance career.”Maybe you’re a person who thinks snide insult and sneering motive-questioning furthers a debate. Try not being needlessly unpleasant and instead addressing the subject, which you totally fail to do.
      Reply · 1 · Like · December 28 at 3:55pm

  • Rob W. Gramer · Follow · Jupiter, Florida

    What a whiner. If you don’t like something, you probably shouldn’t engage in and get paid for it. I didn’t like wasting money via government contracts as an engineer so I up and quit. The problem isn’t dishonesty in the media (ANY media…internet, newspapers, TV, flyers, etc.). And propoganda for power isn’t new. The problem is assholes like this who willingly engage in fraud for profit. Fuck this guy and his first world problems.

    • Rob W. Gramer · Follow · Jupiter, Florida

      Credit to James Finley for finding the article
      Reply · 1 · Like · December 27 at 1:54am

    • Christopher Newton · Follow · San Diego, California

      Very well put Rob … And sadly not many of us left these days willing to do engineering!
      Reply · 1 · Like · December 27 at 5:05am

    • Damien Walter

      Jesus. You really are the most self-involved tit on the internet. “I didn’t like wasting money via government contracts as an engineer so I up and quit”. In what aborted alternate universe does that relate to the article? I’m guessing everything in your tiny little world realtes instantly back to you, right? “Oh look the sky is blue. When I was an ENGINEER I would never have been seen dead being blue.” Moron.
      Reply · 8 · Like · December 27 at 9:36am

  • Cueball McClean

    Just wanted to say thanks for your time and honesty… there are still those of us out here who care.
    Reply · 1 · Like · Follow Post · 11 hours ago

  • Jill Neimark · Follow · Works at Journalist and author

    Luke, a week reporting and writing a piece ain’t serious longform, to those of us spending months reporting and writing 4-6000 word pieces. Though I do agree with many of your points, you miss the boat on good longform which still gets $2-3 word…

    • Jill Neimark · Follow · Works at Journalist and author

      Luke is probably a very good reporter but a week is serious journalism to him, probably because he apparently wrote for the Boston Globe and Slate (or still does) while an hour of reporting and writing is puffery. But if you look at some of the more astounding and gorgeous longform out there this year it was 4-6000 words or longer and deeply reported and well paid, however, I do agree with most of Luke’s points and the outlets for good longform are either shrinking or shifting. But they still are there.
      Reply · 1 · Like · December 26 at 4:50pm

    • Myles Dannhausen · Follow ·  Top Commenter · Chicago, Illinois

      Maybe there’s more of it out there than I think, but I’d be curious to know how many articles over 3,000 words are published nationwide in any given week. Or even how many over 1,200 words are published in the average newspaper. In any case, Luke’s point seems not to be what time-frame constitutes serious reporting, but rather, how low the bar has been dropped.
      Reply · 4 · Like · December 27 at 5:05pm

    • Myles Dannhausen · Follow ·  Top Commenter · Chicago, Illinois

      Incidentally, once I hit the button to post that reply, I got nailed with a pop-up headline, “15 things that will win her over!” from Esquire. Well-played.
      Reply · 2 · Like · December 27 at 5:06pm

  • Larry Levine · Owner at Larry Levine & Associates

    This piece needs to go viral. Defenses need to go up and caution needs to be exercised before pushing the share button.

  • Rudy Haugeneder ·  Top Commenter

    People get what they deserve. Period. If you serve them shit and they eat it and smack their lips in delight, they deserve what they consume — nothing more — regardless of their intelligence or stupidity. Period.
    Perhaps it will all end with a stormy bang — a super Carrington event that’s actually overdue (a super one rather than just the ordinary Carrington-type event) which completely crushes, collapses, destroys everything from nuclear reactors and ordinary power generators, to the computer technology that runs your/my car, turning it into the same junk that your smart phone and the very house or apartment you live in will then suddenly and forever become.
    Failing a Carrington-type event, atmospheric nuclear explosions will do some of the trick (even cheap North Korean junk) as would a huge, huge super volcano. Middle term, if nothing else happens — middle term being five to 40 years, — Climate Change and the accompanying anarchy and destruction will do the same.
    Meanwhile, Happy New Year.

  • Stephen Wells · Follow · Animal Legal Defense Fund

    We’ve traded a mostly corporate gatekeeper model of journalism for a wide open stream of anything goes. I’m not sure which is worse. Both, in their own ways are/were a race to the bottom. We need to learn to be our own gatekeepers. Maybe over time people will learn to assume something is fake until proven otherwise and the free-for-all of share first, ask questions later will cease. I can hope. Meanwhile props to you Luke O’neil and other journalists for fighting the good fight!

  • Michele Horaney ·  Top Commenter · University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

    Ten years ago, I was enthusiastic about the concept and possibility that so many readers and writers could so easily jump into the creativity “pool” and stir up our conversations and thoughts and ideas. This year, I’m yearning for the era in which there was a lot more “mediating” by editors and, even, “owners” who would ask the hard questions, stomp all over idiotic hoaxes, and leave or allow most of us to do a lot more with our lives than just sit glued to screens of all sizes.

  • Kris Baker ·  Top Commenter · None

    Sadly, you are correct.
    I have wonderful friends who’ll share anything — anything at all. Never check, never question.
    The reply when I easily break the truth?
    “What does it hurt?”
    “Oh, it’s funny and I wish it was true about Sarah Palin.”
    MY own rule is that the other side (whichever it is to you) can be shifty and dishonest, but you don’t combat that by sinking to its level.

  • Jonathan Huyghe · KU Leuven

    Complaining about shoddy fact-checking to score cheap clicks while using a click-baity headline is kind of ironic, don’t you think? (for more information, see “The 23 most ironic things from the 90’s… that weren’t actually ironic”, now on Buzzfeed!)

  • Ian Ramsay · Canterbury

    To get through this article I had to navigate through a popup promising “15 songs that will win her over” as well as a side panel detailing “27 things to leave behind in 2013”. The fourth wall was broken before you even had a chance. What does it feel like to be undermined by the outlets you write for?

  • Michael Braun · Follow · Works at Gannett

    Like the State Farm ad shill says: If its on the internet, its gotta be true!
    In the meantime, I’ll keep writing my newspaper articles til they pry my cold dead fingers off my iPhone.

  • Ann Bird · Some business college

    Unfortunately, most of us just want to be entertained and aren’t concerned about veracity of content.

  • Kyle Hey ·  Top Commenter

    We may have broke the internet, but the human as been broken since it was created. Look, god DID fail at something.

  • Jill Neimark · Follow · Works at Journalist and author

    Miles Dannhausen, get the longform app (I have on my iPad) and cherry pick the pubs you might like and wallow in lots of beautiful longform.

  • Duncan Busser · Substitute Teacher at Germantown Academy

    TL;DRWhich is why most people do all the stuff you don’t think they should do.

  • Robert Turner ·  Top Commenter · Mountain View High School

    No works cited, man… but you nailed it.
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