Video never lies, except when it does
That viral clip that made you angry was likely deceptively edited or misleadingly captioned.
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And now our feature presentation:
I’ve long said that if you come across a news story that confirms all of your pre-existing beliefs and makes your political opponents look not just wrong but downright evil, it’s probably false and you should wait a few hours before angrily posting about it. (Note: no one actually waits a few hours before angrily posting about it.)
Yair Rosenberg argues that this applies not just to print, but to video:
On August 8, 2021, social media erupted after a fan behind home plate at a Rockies-Marlins game was caught on air repeatedly shouting the N-word, while Lewis Brinson, a Black player, was at bat. The audio was caught on the official broadcast, and led to tens of thousands of incensed tweets, including from prominent journalists and personalities outside the sports world. The Rockies immediately issued a statement of condemnation, while the opposing team’s announcer excoriated the incident on air. Reporters began to hunt for the offending man in the stands.
The next day, they found him, and everything changed. It turned out that he was a grandfather who was at the game with his family. He had not shouted the N-word. He had shouted “Dinger!”—the name of the Rockies’ purple dinosaur mascot—hoping to get a picture of him with his grandchildren.
This reporting by local news outlets was later confirmed by the Rockies’ own exhaustive inquiry:
After a thorough investigation that included calls, emails, and video clips from concerned fans, media, and broadcast partners, the Colorado Rockies have concluded that the fan was indeed yelling for Rockies mascot Dinger in hopes of getting his attention for a photo, and there was never any racial slur that occurred.
The Marlins announcer apologized on Twitter for his mistaken condemnation, while others quietly deleted their outraged tweets. Some media outlets belatedly corrected the record. But real people were hurt in this story, from members of the Black community who were subjected to a false instance of a racial slur to the grandfather who was besieged by reporters and frightened over an inoffensive utterance. This was the inevitable consequence of a video going viral before anyone figured out what actually happened.
[…]
Viral videos can be captioned inaccurately to mislead us, making our minds think that they are hearing words that were never spoken. Clips can be selectively cut to omit key and exculpatory context, as was the case with footage of Covington Catholic High School student Nicholas Sandmann, who was raked over the social-media coals for allegedly confronting a Native American man when in fact the opposite transpired. (He later received settlements from multiple media outlets.)
Precisely because I’ve been misled by videos like these in the past, I’ve become far more cautious about them in the present. If I can’t personally confirm the contents of a clip, I don’t spread it. I suggest you do the same. When you encounter something that pushes your buttons, don’t immediately hit the share button. After all, if the viral video is accurate, careful reporting over time will bear that out, and you’ll be able to confidently post the material then. If it’s not, you’ll have saved yourself some embarrassment and protected our information ecosystem from even greater pollution. Weighed against these benefits, patience is a small price to pay.
“Scammers and click farmers seeking to garner outrage and followers know that they can take ambiguous clips and present them in the most inflammatory fashion, and that many of us will fall for it, particularly when the deceptive framing confirms things we already believe about the world,” writes Rosenberg.
And one of the worst offenders is Aaron Rupar, whom Cathy Young caught lying about the content of a viral video to get those sweet, sweet outrage clicks:
Correction: Young has twice caught Rupar lying about the content of a viral video to get those sweet, sweet outrage clicks:
These aren’t the only times Rupar has pulled this crap, but he still has over three-quarters of a million Twitter followers and regularly gets retweets from mainstream journalists. If you ever watch Fireman Sam with your kids and complain about everyone in town falling for Norman Price’s ridiculous schemes after being burned time and time again, I’m afraid to report that’s pretty much how real life works.
I just came across Rob Henderson’s Substack newsletter, and I was kind of blown away by this piece:
Henderson argues that, contrary to popular belief, most dictatorships don’t care if the people actually believe its outlandish propaganda. In fact, it’s closer to the opposite: they want to lord it over you that they can blatantly lie to your face and let you know there’s not a damn thing you can do about it:
This is from a fascinating paper titled Propaganda as Signaling by the political scientist Haifeng Huang. The common understanding of propaganda is that it is intended to brainwash the masses. People get exposed to the same message repeatedly and over time come to believe in whatever nonsense the authoritarian regime wants them to believe.
And yet regimes often broadcast silly, unpersuasive propaganda. Huang observes that propaganda might actually be counterproductive, because the official messages often contradict reality. Why display public messages that everyone knows are lies, and that are easily verifiable as lies?
He gives us an answer: Instilling pro-regime values and attitudes is one aim of authoritarian regimes. But it’s not their only aim.
Alongside the desire to brainwash people, the regime also wants to remind people of their power. When citizens are bombarded with propaganda everywhere they look, they are reminded of the strength of the regime. The vast amount of resources authoritarian regimes spend to display their message in every corner of the public square is a costly demonstration of their power.
Propaganda is intended to instill fear in people, not brainwash them. The message is: You might not hold pro-regime values or attitudes. But we will make sure you are too frightened to do anything about it.
Huang describes how China’s primetime news program, Xinwen Lianbo, is stilted, archaic, and is “a constant target of mockery among ordinary citizens.” Yet the Chinese government airs it every night at 7 pm sharp. The continuing existence of this program is intended to remind citizens of the strength and capacity of the communist party.
[…]
If the regime can make the people around you partake in absurdities, you are less likely to challenge it. You will be more likely to obey it. Of course, this doesn’t mean regimes are not interested in indoctrination. They would prefer if people really did hold pro-regime attitudes and values.
But the purpose of propaganda is not limited just to instilling desired beliefs. Often, demonstrating the regime’s strength, capacity, and resources to intimidate people is a more important goal.
This is disturbing not just on its face, but because of the implication that a dictatorship really can’t liberalise without putting itself at risk. Gorbachev and the CPSU arguably learned this the hard way.
It’s sadly not at all uncommon for a liberal democracy to slide into authoritarianism, and there will be a stage where some personal freedoms are tolerated to an extent. (See Russia maybe five or ten years ago, or Hungary today.) But once the regime goes that far, it’s hard to pull back from the brink without the whole thing crashing down. And that leaves doubling down as the last remaining option.
The moment North Koreans see state media organs sheepishly admitting that, okay, Kim Jong-Il never actually scored 11 holes-in-one the very first time he ever played golf, they’ll know the foundation is crumbling. And that’s why Pyongyang won’t allow it to happen.
It me: