At first glance, the headline Reba McIntyre posted on her Instagram account looked like a salacious piece of information from a gossip magazine.
The headline said that McIntyre, who performed “The Star-Spangled Banner” at last month’s Super Bowl, called Taylor Swift an “entitled brat” as she “laughed and drank” during her performance. After McIntyre shouted this headline to her 2.6 million Instagram followers and praised Swift, several news outlets published articles alleging that McIntyre used her post to quash rumors of a so-called feud. was published.
In her post, McIntyre gave some good advice: “Don’t believe everything you see on the Internet.”
The headline came from a satirical Facebook account created by self-proclaimed professional troll Christopher Blair.
He said she took it too seriously.
“I have to believe it was just a knee-jerk reaction or something. She thought that was terrible and reacted,” Blair said of McIntyre’s post. “In today’s internet, you have to be better than that.”
A representative for Mr. McIntyre declined to comment.
Prime Minister Blair runs some of the most successful satirical pages on the internet, targeting conservatives who wouldn’t bother clicking on his fictional farcical headlines. His main Facebook account, “America’s Last Line of Defense,” is part of a network of parody accounts, including an account called “America Loves Liberty,” where he published the McIntyre article.
These pages are linked to his satirical news website, the Dunning Kruger Times. The website features all kinds of fake news articles, almost all of which are signed “Flag Eagleton – Patriot.” Mr Blair warns readers on his page, account and website that “nothing on this page is true”.
Some may question Prime Minister Blair’s approach, but he remains within Facebook’s rules by disclosing at the top of the page that nothing he writes is true. – but that does little to deter many from taking his article seriously.
These pages and McIntyre’s posts give a sense of the ongoing issues surrounding social media, misinformation, and disinformation. Many experts continue to warn about the ease with which fake news spreads online, especially in the lead-up to the presidential election.
Blair’s posts generally tend to be innocuous fodder for handy Facebook users to share, but they illustrate how easily some people can be fooled by misinformation.
Meta, meanwhile, has distanced Facebook and its powerful recommendation system from mainstream news outlets in recent years.
Prime Minister Blair has called his satirical page a “social experiment”, but it’s something he’s using for a very specific purpose: conservatives keen to dunk on conservatives, especially those on the left. , specifically to fool what he calls “elderly Trumpsters.”
“Believe it or not, the end goal of the operation is true,” he said. “The people who tend to believe these stories are on the right, and the more the story confirms their prejudices, the less they need to prove it’s true.”
But Mr Blair said his aim was not necessarily to make a statement about misinformation or disinformation.
“The goal is to be a honeypot of liberal trolls who have a lot of fun and make a lot of money,” he said with a laugh. “I want to be as clear as possible about it so that when people like Reba McEntire come across something like this, they can say, ‘Who the hell said that about me?’ And then they click, and they say, “Oh, you idiots.”
Blair, a lifelong Democrat who launched his page in January 2016, said it was the enthusiasm with which people shared his content without fact-checking that made him so successful. He said his engagement remains high. His latest Facebook post jokingly claimed that singer Garth Brooks looked “tired, depressed, and at least 40 to 50 pounds overweight” during a recent performance. Nearly 800 comments were received in an hour. He said that at some point his page could bring in $15,000 in revenue in a good month.
The problem of people taking misinformation at face value is now well recognized. A 2021 study conducted by a group of researchers from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the University of Regina in Canada, the University of Exeter Business School in the UK, and the Center for Economics Research and Education in Mexico found that 51.2% of participants said, “In one experiment, true news Misinformation was shared online not because we couldn’t tell the difference between and fake news, but because we didn’t pay attention to accuracy.
“While people are often able to distinguish between true and false news content, they fail to even consider whether the content is accurate before sharing it on social media,” said study co-author Regina. says Gordon Pennycook, assistant professor of behavioral science at the university. he told the Nieman Institute in 2021.
Blair spoke out not only about McIntyre’s reaction to the article, but also about how McIntyre shot down rumors about a feud with Swift without revealing that McIntyre was responding to a parody headline. He said he was surprised that the news was reported.
Prime Minister Blair said: “Even if everyone who reads my headline on my page complains about it and tells my fans it’s not true, I’ll never listen to anyone but me. Deaf,” he said. “I would be on the news nonstop.”
