Gute Zusammenfassung, wie sich Falschinformationen von Social Media in die gehetzte Massenmedienwelt fortpflanzen und dort verselbstbestätigen, am Beispiel der jüngsten Pizza-Geschichte.

Romanian Cops Did Not Find Andrew Tate Because Of His Greta Thunberg Video:

It’s…something happens in Romania. And someone speculates some nonsense on Twitter that goes viral. And you don’t speak Romanian so you are limited in your ability to do as much due diligence as you want. And your boss is telling you “tick tock tick tock! Publish the post!” Maybe you hedge and cite “reports”. These reports don’t really exist but they might appear to exist if you look at your Twitter feed. Then you publish your post and you create a report. Even with the hedge, it makes some editor at some other publication yell “tick tock” even louder to their reporter, who feels more comfortable publishing their version because you already have done so. And so on and so on and so on. And everyone else? They already want to believe this because it is so perfect in an Aristotelian dramatic sense.

And by the time someone in Romania publishes a story about what actually happened, this rampant unfounded speculation has already been repeated endlessly on the other side of the world. And it will inspire memes and arguments. To be fluent in the culture war you’ll have to be fluent in the fiction. And one day when you’re old and aged and grey, it will come up somehow and you’ll google it and find out it wasn’t true and think “huh” and then as the light dims out and you shuffle off this mortal coil you’ll wonder “I wonder what else I was wrong about” and then you’ll die and your television show will end, but since you didn’t get an answer it will end the way no television show wants to end: with a cliffhanger.

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