One of the biggest threats to our democracy/republic/whatever you want to call it is misinformation.
Misinformation is responsible for millions of people believing the 2020 presidential election was stolen, even though there’s not a single speck of credible evidence that it was. Misinformation is the reason why vaccine hesitancy is leading to needless illness and death. It’s why some people don’t believe that human-caused climate change is a problem—despite near-unanimous scientific consensus.
Social media has been one of the primary drivers of misinformation—and now that Elon Musk is in control of Twitter/X, matters are only getting worse.
For a prime example of this, let’s look to Las Vegas, and specifically a misinformation-caused mess involving the Las Vegas Review-Journal newspaper. In a Sept. 18 piece headlined “Demonizing journalists to spread disinformation is dangerous and undemocratic,” executive editor Glenn Cook explained what happened.
Here are the facts: On Aug. 14, a speeding car struck and killed a bicyclist named Andreas Probst, a 64-year-old retired police chief. The car was stolen by two teens—and that they purposely ran down Probst, with one of them filming a video of the murder. As Cook writes, “It’s a snuff film.” The 17-year-old driver was charged with murder; the Review-Journal wrote about the video and the murder charge on Aug. 31, when these awful details came to light.
Glenn explains where misinformation comes into the story: “But somehow, someone who watched the video … found one of the Review-Journal’s first reports on Probst’s killing—the Aug. 18 obituary that identified Probst as the victim—and made the false assumption that the story was reported after the video was discovered and after the driver was charged with murder. A social media post was created, accusing the Review-Journal of deliberately characterizing the murder of a retired lawman as a ‘bike crash,’ words from the obituary’s headline. As the post quickly circulated through the feeds and groups of like-minded media bashers, the narrative worsened. Assumptions were made about the race of the two people in the car. We were far-left, anti-cop, anti-white liars. And a whole lot of other things I can’t write here. Of course, we didn’t know about the video at the time this particular story was written. Neither did police. But untold thousands of angry readers didn’t want the facts to get in the way of this frenzy.”
One of the people who didn’t want to let the facts get in the way of the frenzy? Elon Musk.
“At 3:08 a.m. Sunday (Sept. 17),” Cook wrote, “(Musk) retweeted a screen grab from the Review-Journal app with the misunderstood story, and wrote, ‘An innocent man was murdered in cold blood while riding his bicycle. The killers joked about it on social media. Yet, where is the media outrage? Now you begin to understand the lie.’”
That tweet, by the way, is still up as of this writing. It has 72.4 million views.
Sabrina Schnur, the reporter who wrote the original story, as well as other Review-Journal staffers, have since been inundated with vitriol. Cook wrote that social-media users “filled Twitter/X with comments and tags that ranged from anti-Semitic to death wishes for (Schnur) and her dog. She had more than 700 notifications of malevolence as of Sunday, and they’re still coming.”
Elon Musk and many of the others who spread this misinformation and fanned the figurative flames should be ashamed. But they’re not.
It’s crucial that all of us make sure that the information we’re sharing—be it in conversations, via social media, or anywhere else—is accurate, from a reliable source.
Because not only does misinformation deceive; it could wind up getting someone innocent killed.
Note: This is a slightly edited version of the editor’s note that appeared in the October 2023 print edition. Much of this column was originally published online in the Sept. 21 Indy Digest.
