A piece of misreporting takes on a life of its own

[Brightonian]

A Twitter thread: https://twitter.com/Orla_Hegarty/status ... 0735082497

[bob sterman]

There's an XKCD for that...

https://xkcd.com/978/

[Woodchopper]

That’s a really interesting example of how a conventional wisdom is created from endless repetition of dodgy data.

[Gfamily]

There's an XKCD for that...

https://xkcd.com/978/

citogenesis is a great word.

[Woodchopper]

There's an XKCD for that...

https://xkcd.com/978/

There’s a similar process involving:

Anonymous account writes something on Twitter -> gets repeated by celebrities with lots of followers -> dodgy media reports the celeb tweets -> the controversy is reported by established media -> for many becomes a ‘fact’.

[secret squirrel]

The CIA (and others) made, and presumably still make, extensive use of this principle. The idea is to put a completely fabricated story about e.g. communist atrocities* into a local paper in, say, Guatemala, then get it into a national paper, then into the international press, working up the 'reliability' chain till it's in the New York Times as an established fact.

*Some stories of communist atrocities were of course true.

[Bird on a Fire]

After the Met shot Jean Charles de Menezes, it was widely reported that he'd jumped the ticket barrier and run from police.

In fact, he'd paid the fare with his Oyster card and was walking normally. A witness had seen a cop jump the barrier, and got confused.

Nevertheless the known falsehood was encouraged to circulate, no doubt because it made Dick et al. look sightly less spectacularly and tragically incompetent, and to this day a lot of people believe it.

[bob sterman]

After the Met shot Jean Charles de Menezes, it was widely reported that he'd jumped the ticket barrier and run from police.

In fact, he'd paid the fare with his Oyster card and was walking normally. A witness had seen a cop jump the barrier, and got confused.

Nevertheless the known falsehood was encouraged to circulate, no doubt because it made Dick et al. look sightly less spectacularly and tragically incompetent, and to this day a lot of people believe it.

That falsehood still circulates today! It's infuriating. Along with the nonsense about him wearing a big heavy coat with wires protruding from it - probably another cop with a radio.