Scary, scary baby.

[Honor]

Having to turn to google to get info on it? Having to turn to google to tell you if it is true or not? It may be unrelated, but not so much since it may be actively being done within this thread, but I’m curious exactly how much back story or unrelated web sites spouting the same ridiculously false information, how many detailed research studies of something that doesn’t exist, and how many pictures of specimens and ‘evidence’ that needs to be propagated onto the internet for otherwise perfectly intelligent people to believe something that is so obviously made up. Not that it is the case here, but given a medical name [false or otherwise] as in this case, or whatever is an appropriate descriptor, and a couple doctored photos of sufferers through history, I’m curious of the ease at which general society can absorb what would otherwise be considered obvious falsehood as undisputed fact.

It would be an interesting experiment, if it was coordinated and executed in a swift manner with sufficient volume of content, exactly how stupid an idea you can take people by storm with.

Of course though, without giving examples [partially so not to offend by chance, but more so because the examples are so numerous], history has told us that very stupid ideas can propagate very easily though stupid/uneducated people. The interesting part would be if the same level of stupid ideas can propagate through intelligent and questioning people if sufficient legitimate looking information is within easy access.


Not that this is made up [which it may very well be made up, just that it is not certain].... It's just a thought.

edit: Also, would it even be possible to easily stop an intentional lie [by coming out with that the entire story was made up, or whatever], or stop it at all, once it had taken hold as truth.

I think this is an incredibly compelling idea... But, you know me. I have to answer in detail first.

I wouldn't say "Having to turn to google to get info on it?" or "Having to turn to google to tell you if it is true or not?"... "Having" to do something suggests a lot of things... Not just that there is a better way, but that there are a lot of better ways... That most ways would be better... That the course of action one is forced to take is somehow grossly undesirable...

The first line... "Having to turn to google to get info on it?"... Well, of course. Why not? Google is just a directory. An incomplete table of contents. There's nothing wrong with using it as a tool to help sort the billions of pages of information out there by potential relevance.

The second line is very different... "Having to turn to google to tell you if it is true or not?" Google doesn't nor does it purport to tell you what's true. If you google "squid", one link will bring you the most correct information available, another will bring you utter and complete fiction. It's up to you to evaluate... Detirmine which is which. Yes, this is made more difficult by the fact that there will always be some sources who, for whatever reason, claim to be tru when they are not... But this is not the fault of Google, or any other search untility. You will find willfully false information in any university library, too... Google is just a really, really powerful Table of Contents.

So I kinda have to object to the implication that starting the search for fact there is in any way inferior, but it's just my usual kind of semantic objection, probably... It's only inferior if the searcher doesn't dig and verify to such a degree as is needed in the situation at hand.

----- ----- ----- ----- -----

Now... To the juicy experiment.

Could it be done...? Sure. Of course.

How much "supporting evidence" would you need? Well... I'd say that obviously depends on how outrageous what you wanted to "prove" was, and how well you wanted to "prove" it.

Could you turn it off when you "outed" it? If done properly, I don't think you ever actually could. Not all the way dead. Most of us all still get emails about Microsoft or AOL giving us a pile of money if we just forward the email to everyone we know...

It's all very compelling... If done properly, it's certainly grab it's moment of immense internet fame. The more complelling and complete the illusion, the more fame for the team that does it.

Ugh... I'm falling asleep at the keyboard. Time to close.

So... Anyone want to put together a team and do it?

[Awkwardschoolgirl]

Well, it was kind of already done. If anyone recalls the Bonzai Kitty experiment from a few years back... They had a whole website up and sent a foreward around to everyone with pictures and explainations on how they put kittens in small glass containers, made holes in the glass for fecal matter, urine, feeding, and breathing, and explained that the kittnes bones were deformed to the shake of the container or something. I know way too many people who believed it and still do... It's still going around somewhere too.

[Gible]

I don't care if they are fake....I WANT ONE!

[Chaszmyr Mae'Val]

Well, it was kind of already done. If anyone recalls the Bonzai Kitty experiment from a few years back... They had a whole website up and sent a foreward around to everyone with pictures and explainations on how they put kittens in small glass containers, made holes in the glass for fecal matter, urine, feeding, and breathing, and explained that the kittnes bones were deformed to the shake of the container or something. I know way too many people who believed it and still do... It's still going around somewhere too.

I got taken in by that.

[Honor]

That was a good one... But I'm thinking something much more complex....

Like, when you see those TV commercials on TV for the Ionic Breeze, and it says they have the "endorsement of the Prestigious Brittish Allergy Foundation." And I'm thinking 'yea, right'... it could just be that the company hires some bonehead consultant in England, gets a post box for an address, puts up a website, and founds the Brittish Allergy Foundation, and them they endorse themselves. Hell, they could cut to the chase and do it with just the web site.

But here's my idea (or, more accurately, the idea EoL's post gave me):

First we come up with a product, or movement, or condition, or kink or something. It has to be well and thoroughly thought out... every detail accounted for. Let's say, for the sake of this illustration, we choose some kind of medical condition. Then we:

• Prepare our source material... Photoshopped images, technical, lay, and vulgar write-ups, ect.
• We make medical establishment looking website(s) with entries covering it.
• We make text and banner ads for products and services targeted at this malady
• We make the business sites those ads link to
• We create LJ accounts of people who have or have relatives who have the condition, and LJ communities to support and discuss the conditon. (also xanga, myspace, whatever)
• We post UrbanDictionary and other reference site write ups and mentions on it.
• We make a wikipedia entry about it.
• THEN we hit the high-bulk, low-IQ market with it... Whether that's chans, ebaums, or wherever we find that a lot of the people viewing it might go for it enough to look for evidence as to it's veracity...
• and, as they say in show business, hilarity ensues.

Maybe, here and there, we even leave little trace links... For those who get it. If you figure out this is a hoax, and youwant to play along... then it becomes viral.. other people make photoshopped "proof" images, create LJ accounts, post to communities...

Then we write a doctoral thesis or a book or a documentary about it... called... I don't know... InfoClap or something.

[Sweet or Sour]

A beautiful proposal, but long before anyone has any exposing links, it is important to have all the back-information already setup and fully explored by the various web surfing bots out there [the search engines] that will draw the support to the web. Have a multitude of people who have already voted their sympathy to the sufferer’s live journal, different people for different sufferers [who cares if they are all made up people, which they most certainly be a huge list of aliases for the same project], sites with information that look official that reference a hierarchy of official looking information. [fake] Doctors’ names who have documentation relating to past involvement on actual legitimate projects that they may have contributed to, to lend legitimacy to our fabricated project by proxy. Various studies on mortality rates and racial statistics of contraction [all the run-of-the-mill studies that are done in the case of a disease], maybe even a back trace of the origin of the illness that has it quickly fade into obscurity once the line goes back several hundred years, but not nicely put together for people, but instead scattered out so others can draw inferences. It would be fascinating to see if this can be actually pulled off, but to make it truly work, there could be no details or specifics mentioned in publicly recorded places. This is something that must be executed gracefully if it is to be as permeating as would make it most rewarding. Though really, it would only be funnier if it was quite out-there, absolutely unbelievable without the multitude of support that would be falsified to make it seem legitimate. Somebody reading would have to have the sense that they stumbled onto a huge problem that they just didn’t know about before, with an already fully grown community [as is the case if you stumble onto anything that is real].

On the note of saying that “using google to tell if it was true or not”, it was just in reference to the sort of superficial single-leveled, just below the presented surface kind of error checking that all the scrutiny that people put against many things that seem quite fishy, like this deformed baby story. The articles name a disease name, they name a place that actually exists, but no names of participants in positions of authority who could be reasonably researched, or really anything that would help distinguish it from fantasy, so people google the disorder name, and find a huge list of web sites and pictures of the disorder. Never mind that this particular event may never had happened, that this child was in reality a plastic toy troll or something. It was meant to be a comment against the low level of scrutiny that many apply to things they are told in general [real life too, it seems nobody questions the newspaper], that this sort of superficial look is exactly what allows people to be tricked so easily. Usually it doesn’t matter if we are tricked, as in the case of front topic of this thread, how many of us really cares if this happened or not? But we are tricked often on far more important things, and since we are used to the illusions we are presented with crumbling under minimal effort and questioning, we [of course I too am guilty of this] do not examine things as closely as we often times should, even if just out of convenience, and occasionally just straight out believe something we are presented with that goes against our collective better judgement, based on who told it to us. To use your example of a directory to represent google, it is like looking somebody’s name up in the phone book to prove that the stories you have heard about the person are indeed true, because obviously this person exists. It was meant to be a comment toward the ridiculous.


Sorry for the rubber stopper in the thread, some day I'll master the paragraph.

[Tha_Pig]

Poor defective thing...

Well, at least they didn't lynch the mother this time! In some countries such malformations are blamed on some "sin" and it would cost her life.

[Error of Logic]

>_<; A friend of mine posted the article on another forum ... with the photographs still attached! Horrible ... That poor child ...