A Poe that worked a bit too well.

When I saw the NYT spoof front page a few days ago, I thought it to be a bad attempt at a Poe. My initial thoughts were that the last line was unnecessarily blatant and gave the game away too openly.

Seems that I hadn't counted on the gullibility of the people, from every side of the political spectrum.

The more I live and observe life in these times of social media, the more I realise how strongly confirmation bias affects and influences us all, from the most conscious, aware, educated sceptic to the most blind, ignorant, naive boor. In this hamaam, we are all naked.

Some are taken in by forwarded Whatsapp posts about something so transparently fake that it takes a lot of pre-existing belief in that particular non-fact (and generally the ideology behind it) to forward it excitedly and quote it as a source in conversations and even debates. Those that laugh at these naive idiots and wonder how they could miss the in-your-face fakery of the said writing, when it's their turn, completely miss the similarly in-your-face spoof and tom-tom it as some kind of gotcha.

The truth is that both sides are so heavily invested in their version of the narrative that we will seek out stuff that feeds into our deeply held beliefs and convince our brains to buy the story without putting in even the least bit of research (like reading the damn thing fully) that we seem to expect our opponents to do before they share their fake news.

The hilarious part is that this spoof, which if you simply read completely (it's literally not more than half a dozen sentences) is clearly made by someone mocking the faux song & dance and hype around the PM's overseas visit, is being shared with the same gleeful abandon by both sides, one of which it was targeted at with an intent to mock their gullibility, and the other, which has proven itself equally, if not more, gullible to stuff that feeds their own paranoia.

And now, either no one's laughing (because both have realised what chumps they have made themselves into) or everyone's laughing the loud, raucous fake laughter of someone caught farting but would like to pretend that it was the chair seat or the shoes that made that obvious sound, and who continues to make that sound louder and louder repetitively just to cover their embarrassment and prove (to no one in particular and everyone in general) that it wasn't them farting, but that other thing that made the obnoxious sound. No one believes them and everyone is awkward.

P.S: I had written about it here long back.