On Saturday, Donald Trump — a man who, if he has his way, will one day be charged with evaluating information of critical international importance — tweeted an obviously doctored video of a protester, Thomas DiMassimo. The clip, which has since been removed from YouTube, shows an April 2015 Black Lives Matter protest with the original audio swapped out for the ISIS propaganda song “Saleel al-Sawarim.” On that basis, Trump concluded that DiMassimo supported the Islamic State.
[What was fake on the Internet this week: Why this is the final column]
To critical consumers of Internet content, the video immediately raises a whole bunch of red flags. But Trump is an infamously uncritical Internet consumer, and in an interview yesterday with Chuck Todd, he defended the tweet under that logic.
“All I know is what’s on the Internet,” he told Todd — which, if interpreted literally, may be the single most terrifying thing that any presidential candidate has ever said. In an environment where one can find “proof,” of a kind, for literally every conspiracy theory, wild allegation and fringe point of view, Trump has essentially admitted that he lacks either the fundamental literacy skills to sift fact from fiction, or a basic interest in distinguishing between the two.
In neither respect is he alone, unfortunately: Two decades of credibility research suggest that virtually no one vets the stuff they read or watch online.
Instead — as U.C. Santa Barbara’s Miriam Metzger and Andrew Flanagin have found over a series of more than a dozen studies — mainstream Internet users evaluating new information frequently rely on factors like what Web sites look like, whether their friends appear to trust them, and if it confirms what they think already. That isn’t just because people are biased or ignorant or lazy. It’s because evaluating information takes a lot of mental bandwidth, and frankly, no one has enough of it to fact-check everything.
That said, double-checking a provocative YouTube video doesn’t require any particular time period or specialized Internet skills. You are well-prepared to disprove Trump if you know what Google is.
I’m personally convinced that we could make a profound dent in election-cycle BS if everyone could agree to a two-step, 60-second fact-checking process: Before you share the latest bit of Internet gossip, (a) read the “about” or “profile” page associated with it and (b) run a cursory Google search of any concrete, provable details — names, places, dates, photos — contained therein.
For purposes of demonstration, here’s what you’ll find if you try that method on the DiMassimo video:
- Surprise! The soundtracked video does not appear among the four clips DiMassimo’s YouTube channel, as claimed. Instead, it originated on the (now-deleted) account of some rando called Thomas Jenners — which, as far as we can tell, may not even be a real name.
- The video was filmed not at an ISIS rally but at a Black Lives Matter protest at Wright State University. Google “Wright State + Thomas Dimassimo + #notmyflag” — three concrete, provable details that appear in the video itself — and you’ll find a contemporary local news account that detailed the protest. As an added bonus, if you Google-Translate the Arabic text in the video’s caption, you’ll find that it calls DiMassimo a string of unprintable insults and concludes that he “hates America.”
Is that conclusive? Maybe not. But it’s quick! And it’s easy! And it definitely suggests that, if all you know is “what’s on the Internet,” then you definitely know enough to give you pause before tweeting.
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