I know this is going to shock you, but someone out there on social media is wrong about something.
And it’s not just a garden-variety error. This person has made an assertion akin to insisting three plus three equals seven, or that white collar crime doesn’t exist, or that leaves are never green. It is akin to arguing that this country has no homeless people, or fast-food restaurants, or canyons, or sport-utility vehicles. It is conceivable that the statement is an extreme example of Pauline Kael-ism — “I can’t believe Nixon won, I don’t know anyone who voted for him” — but the phenomenon denied is so commonplace that it feels like this person is saying that because the individual is claiming to have never seen a tornado or a Tesla with their own eyes, they doubt those things exist.
This statement is so spectacularly wrong that this person, who has a position of a modest level of prominence and influence, must either be completely deluded, have suffered a recent serious head injury, or know that the statement is wrong, and put it out there anyway, to troll those who disagree, and/or to attract attention.
I’m not mentioning which person or what statement they made, because I strongly suspect that this person did so for attention. And if I wrote a Corner post saying, “hey, look at this person of modest level of prominence and influence who wrote something glaringly, obviously wrong,” I would only be doing this person a favor. I would be doing promotional work for this person.
(If this person happens to see this Corner post and claims it is about themselves and their statement, they likely also believe that Carly Simon indeed wrote that song about them.)
If this spectacularly false statement was made in attempt to attract attention, it appears to be working. Today, the spectacularly erroneous statement is getting furiously shared, quoted, denounced, dunked upon, etc. Many people have shared the statement, with some version of, “get a load of what this idiot said!”… and in the process, ensured this person reaches a much, much wider audience.
And if the goal is to reach a much wider audience, maybe this person isn’t such an idiot after all.
I don’t know if this statement was shared on multiple social media platforms, but I do know that Facebook, among others, uses an algorithm that tries to predict how likely you are to engage with a post, and puts the posts most likely to get “engagement” in front of the biggest audience. When you insist, “three plus three equals seven,” a lot of people engage with it. They counter it, mock it, denounce it, fume about it… and in the process, ensure that more and more people will notice and pay attention to the whole brouhaha.
Put something out there that is outrageous, provocative, controversial, or just flat wrong, and there’s a good chance will get a lot of attention, even though much of that attention will be negative. (And in reverse, put out something that is common sense, factually correct, and nigh-indisputable, and it may well get almost no attention. There’s not much to argue about with those.) I suppose the thinking is that at least some of the people who pay attention to the deliberate artificial controversy will gravitate to you, even if you are completely, provably wrong.
In other words, a lot of social media platforms and users effectively reward you for being wrong.
Trollish or potentially deliberately-spectacularly wrong social media posts are a bit like the description of nuclear war in WarGames — a strange game; the only winning move is not to play.