Take A Seat

Several people I know have posted a video recently, a short animated film that seems to have a sweet message about kindness and treating each other with respect.

You can read the description yourself.

I haven’t watched it, even though it seems to be very short and inoffensive. I try not to click on obvious lies. Just kind of a rule for me.

I’m going to assume that, if I had watched the video, I would have suspected it hadn’t won an Oscar. The odd participle/passive verb usage (has won the Oscar) and the added article (the best animated movie) suggests to me either some unfamiliarity with the nuances of English grammar or an attempt to appear as recent news.

I glanced at the post, which started to appear in my newsfeed about a week ago, and just scooted by. This isn’t special, or remarkable at all. I thought, yeah, that didn’t win an Oscar and moved on.

But it stayed with me, and a minute later I went back. I still had no plans to watch, but I decided to research first. Maybe I was assuming too much.

Nope. Five minutes of poking around in the Academy Awards database and other searches turn up zilch. It’s a lie.

...

What difference does it make? Good question.

Let’s start with the assumption of good will. Here’s this nice little animation with a positive message. Someone thinks it needs to be pumped up a bit, so it’ll go viral, so they add the lie about winning an Oscar.

Or, we can remove good intentions and just chalk it up to the dream of a viral video. Make up some stuff and see if people click.

Finally—and this is where I always land—an attempt to deceive me online is always going to be suspicious. If you’re not suspicious, then I suspect you haven’t been paying attention over the past few years.

But even that’s not really the point.

...

I’m not suggesting that this video has anything sinister about it. I actually doubt that it does, as it resides on YouTube and various other websites without any alarms apparently being raised.

So what’s the harm in a little made-up publicity?

My first point is that this is a sign of bad behavior (not theirs. Ours). Again, we’ve been warned over and over again that there are bad actors out there, especially on Facebook. We assume safety because it’s a video embedded on Facebook—that’s probably a false sense of security, but it’s also hard to tell that it’s simply a video and not just a graphic (as above) , a link to a web page filled with nasty bugs.

Clicking on something that is obviously trying to fool you is...foolish, you think? Particularly since the description contains a specific, easily verified claim. Did it actually win an Oscar? Take 60 seconds to find out, maybe.

This isn’t to say that people sharing this video are in on the deception. They’re just part of it now. Instead of checking out the details, they just share and move on. Boy, I wish people would just stop sharing. I rarely see the point, and it just spreads this shit.

It’s the other part that worries me, and why I bumped on this dumb video. It’s the fungible nature of truth here in 2019. The paradox of living in this era is that as easy as it is to spread fiction, it’s almost as easy to disprove it.

I’m not suggesting that we go into deep research mode with every link we see. There’s basic online hygiene, and then there’s paranoia. Sometimes you just want to watch a video of otters holding hands. You don’t want to be cynical about otters. I get that.

But c’mon. This is obvious. This isn’t just a video! It won an Oscar! It must be really special.

I’m not overreacting, I promise. I’m sure there’s nothing dangerous about watching this video. Feel free. Just ignore the Oscar hype stuff.

It’s really easy to ignore. And then we end up living in a world in which casual truth and lies exist in the same moment and we’re too overwhelmed and busy to figure it out. We believe what we want, and disbelieve the rest, and now that I think about it, this is exactly the world we live in. Never mind.