Literally Unbelievable, the single-serving Tumblr that basically aggregates all of your gullible aunts’ and uncles’ Facebook reactions to The Onion stories as if they were real, just launched a couple weeks ago, and it quickly went viral. The idea for the blog came about after so many people fell for The Onion’s “Planned Parenthood Opens $8 Billion Abortionplex” piece.
But wait a minute: Isn’t it possible that we’re dealing with an even bigger meta-prank here when we take this blog at its word? How do we know that we aren’t falling into the same satirical trap that these allegedly hapless Onion readers (or non-readers, rather) are when we chuckle at Literally Unbelievable?
Think about all of the iPhone Auto-correct gag blogs, like Damn You Auto Correct!, that went up in the past year or so, with screen shots of text conversations where moms would accidentally text their daughters to say that they’re on their way pick up a dildo from the store — I mean dinner! — due to the phone’s frustrating insistence of fixing your texts for you. Eventually, as with nearly everything else on the internet, people started suspecting them to be fakes, like this one:
“Like most of these, this one is staged. The iPhone doesn’t have dildo in the list of auto-correctable words. Funny, but fake,” writes one commenter.
Given enough time, with anything that seems too funny to be true, we approach the gullibility tipping point. After you see enough of these auto-correct boners — sorry, penises — I mean mistakes! — you start to question whether or not they are real. Same idea behind Facebook reaction blogs like Literally Unbelievable. How hard is it to cook up a screen shot of a Facebook commenter, blurring out the name and photo? Not very.
But maybe it doesn’t matter if they’re fake or not, because the essence of the blog gets at a larger truth, one that we’re all very much invested in believing: Other people are idiots.
A quick scan down the Internet memory lane: Nigerian princes, outrageous email forwards from family members about whatever political party is in power at the time and how they’re coming to steal your job and money and kill your grandparents, everything ever posted at An actual study a few months back, funded by the U.S. Department of Education about students’ Internet literacy, found that students “simply have very little in the way of critical evaluation skills,” according to Dr. Leu, founder and director of the New Literacies Research Lab at the University of Connecticut. At least I think it was real. Is “literacies” even a word?
“They may tell you they don’t believe everything they read on the Internet, but they do,” Leu said. “Anyone can publish anything on the Internet and today’s students are not prepared to critically evaluate the information they find there.”
In other words, Internet Gullibility Syndrome may only be getting worse as younger generations are weaned on a constant deluge of misinformation.
Alarming for our future, perhaps, but great for laughs in the meantime. We do actually want to live in a world where people mistake satire for truth because that means we can differentiate ourselves from them and feel superior.
That’s particularly true of people who happen to have differing political opinions than ours. And for the younger, generally tech-savvy demographic that Tumblrs like these and The Onion itself appeal to, more often than not that’s going to mean a liberal-leaning outlook. Bunch of Red state rubes falling for The Onion then, right? Well, mostly, yes, but not exactly. One of the interesting things about the blog is how it proves that being an Internet sucker is still politically neutral. “Obama Finishes Deal To Get Every American A Free Parrot,” for example, had one Democrat lamenting how hard this would make it to convince his friends to vote to re-elect the president when he’s wasting his time on giving away parrots.
Remember the site ChristWire.org that we all freaked out about for five seconds last year before realizing it was a pretty deft parody of a fundamentalist religion website? There are still people commenting on stories like this one here where they explain that raves are descended from secret Nazi parties “where they doped themselves up on heroin drugs and smoked meth rocks until all hours of the night, while banging on drums to put themselves into a state of enraged ecstasy.” The site isn’t even trying to seem remotely realistic anymore, but it doesn’t matter.
That’s the most depressing thing I’ve seen all week and I just saw a dude checking the coin slot of a pay phone to see if it had any change in it just now. Not surprising maybe, because the only group with a worse sense of humor than Christians and conservatives, are people who take the intricacies of the differences between genres of electronic music too seriously.
It’s entirely possible that all the comments there are jokes themselves too, but then how do you explain stories like this in the alt-weekly The Stranger, where they recently , the unfortunately Google-burdened former Congressman:
“But… but… but… he knows about his ‘Google problem!’ He MUST know how these could be read… Is he that clueless or is he trying to be Savage-defying, or what?” read one comment.
Many of the ostensibly Internet savvy The Stranger readers — they’re from Seattle for Christ’s sake — fell for what is clearly a spoof Twitter account. Not because they’re stupid, but simply because they want to believe so much that this politician whom they revile is clueless, that they end up suffering from the political gullibility delusion themselves. Then who ends up looking stupid?
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