Don’t Believe Everything You See on Twitter

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Earlier this month, I wrote about a photo circulating of kids “playing on their phones instead of looking at paintings in a famous museum”.

Except they weren’t playing.  I wrote about how they were using the museum app to learn more about the painting they were just examining, and whoever circulated that photo knew that.

In the last two days, I’ve seen this photo circulating a lot.  This is a meme I saw circulating last year too.  And the year before.  And it’s completely fake.

People have been outraged because they think it is ridiculous for Calvin Klein to consider that woman plus-sized.

Except they don’t.  They never called her plus-sized.

People saw Calvin Klein using a woman who is a little bigger than their usual models and somehow inserted this “and Calvin Klein considers her plus-sized” narrative.

Earlier this week, I saw another debunked story being retweeted pretty wildly.  This is the crazy part–the initial tweet that was being retweeted accidentally linked to the wrong article.  And no one retweeting this knew.

That’s when Gary from View from the Wing sent me this sad stat:

See also https://t.co/DvAwpgXSWN https://t.co/7uzURELL3u

— gary leff (@garyleff) June 23, 2016

I haven’t read this but clearly you should. https://t.co/UdxmMIF5RC

— gary leff (@garyleff) June 19, 2016

Edit: That didn’t include the tweet he had quoted and I’m on mobile now, but here’s the most important tweet in that series:

6 in 10 of you will share this link without reading it, a new, depressing study says https://t.co/Bsh8VjO1w4 #news #journalism #algorithm

— Paul Nemitz (@PaulNemitz) June 19, 2016

So just because someone retweets something, doesn’t mean they read it.  In fact, it means they probably didn’t!