So a certain blog post is once again circulating as news through my Facebook network, after originally appearing last April, which means there’s a decent chance it’s plowing through your news feed as well: “Ann Romney: Why should women be paid equal to men?” First off, it’s not real. It’s obviously not real — the site’s slogan is “news that’s almost reliable.” OK? It also doesn’t sound especially real, particularly when you get to this, "Who's going to want to hire a woman, or for that matter, even marry a woman who thinks she is the same, if not better than a man at any job. It's almost laughable. C'mon now ladies, are you with me on this?" Though, I’ll admit, it doesn’t seem too far out of the ballpark, and you might not have to search far to find some Romney cohort spewing something like that, minus the “C’mon now ladies.” Which I guess is why it spreads so well — it’s not totally out there, and it certainly doesn’t have that one particular thing that tends to give satire away: being funny, or even a little bit amusing.Obviously, bias plays a role in people taking the bait on posts like this — we want to believe things that support our own perspective (Ann Romney is a square, rich white woman who’s terrible) — but it also just doesn’t immediately scream satire because, well, it’s terrible satire. So you don’t have to give it a hit, I clicked on another post, titled “Chick-fil-A President Dan Cathy – ‘We don't like the blacks either’.” Check out these fresh hot lulz: “According to our source, Cathy ultimately chose to focus his hate on African Americans after considering and dismissing a promotion that would put actual AK-47s in their Kid's Meals.” That’s the only thing that really stands out in the post worthy of a splat; the rest is just boring mush that might have been autogenerated by some satire ipsum generator.It’s also kind of an outdated, fuddy-duddy satire ipsum generator. Here’s another post: “Schools Replace Summer Reading List with Summer YouTube Video List.” And it’s the sort of thing that you would think is real because it probably is real in a lot of places, just outside of the awareness of who or whatever is generating these terrible posts. Like, I’ve taken high-level college math courses with the help of YouTube videos. It wasn’t particularly strange. Neither would this post, in the real world: "Romney makes a stop in Uganda to aid Ebola victims, Gives speech on Privatized Healthcare." (I'm not giving this thing linkbacks, no way.) This is actually usually how it goes, IRL: right-wingers spin health crises into tales of evil government intervention. Someone from the Republican party is probably giving that speech somewhere as I type this. But, here, it's an attempt at satire. But rather than actually being satire, it just sounds like making up some bit of inflammatory news for some hits.So my theory is that these things aren’t about being funny. They’re about getting quick social media hits from people that skim headlines and don’t look at sources. Of which there are a great many in these here days of hyper-sharing, when the appearance of being informed begins to take over for being actually informed.Reach this writer at michaelb@motherboard.tv.
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