Outrage Travels Fast, Context Takes Time: Why the Internet’s Scariest Claims Are Half-True

There are certain words on the internet that can make a man sit upright before he has even finished his coffee: Congress, corporations, eminent domain, profit. Put all four in the same sentence and you hardly need punctuation. The blood pressure will supply it.

That happened to me recently. I came across a short segment claiming Congress had given private, for-profit companies the power to use eminent domain for their own profit. It was delivered with exactly the amount of alarm you would expect, the sort of thing designed to make you wonder whether someone is already measuring your back pasture while you are watching the video.

I felt it. That little tightening. That immediate, Now hold on just a minute.

Then I did something terribly inconvenient to modern outrage.

I looked.

The claim had not been invented. There was a real law. There was real eminent-domain authority. Private companies really could be involved.

And that is where things became interesting.

There was also history missing from the story. There were limitations missing. There were federal requirements, permitting rules, and an earlier law dating back years before the legislation being blamed in the video.

In other words, the story contained facts. It just did not contain enough of them.

Perhaps that is one of the more effective tricks of our age:

The internet has learned that a half-truth does not need to lie. It only needs to arrive before the other half.

That troubles me more than an obvious falsehood.

A ridiculous story is relatively easy to dismiss. If someone tells me Congress has outlawed Tuesday and all citizens must now raise llamas, I feel reasonably confident waiting for additional information.

But give me a genuine statute, a genuine quotation, a genuine scientific paper, a genuine photograph, then remove everything surrounding it.

Now we have something powerful.

The reader can check one portion of the claim and discover that it is true. From there, the emotional conclusion can hitch a ride.

And emotion travels quickly.

Outrage is fast. Context has to put its shoes on.

By the time somebody has found the original legislation, read the relevant section, discovered what law preceded it, and figured out exactly what changed, the original post has already been shared ten thousand times.

Corrections rarely travel at the same speed. They are too boring.

“Upon further examination, several statutory limitations apply” has never caused anyone to leap from the sofa and shout for Christina to come look at Facebook.

Fire gets considerably better mileage.

Politics is certainly not alone in this. Medicine does it. Nutrition does it. Technology does it. Religion does it. Environmental stories do it. Financial stories do it.

Almost every subject now seems to arrive already seasoned with the emotion we are expected to feel about it. Before we have been told what happened, someone has often told us how angry, frightened, or offended we ought to be.

And I am not standing outside this problem pointing at everybody else.

Certain words still get my feathers up. Certain institutions make me suspicious before I finish the first paragraph. I know my own buttons.

That may be precisely why I have become more interested in stopping for a moment before allowing somebody else to push them.

Not because alarming claims are always false. Some are true. Some are mostly true. Some are partly true. And occasionally the most misleading sentence on the internet is technically accurate.

That may be the sentence we should examine most carefully.

So now I am trying something simple: read one more paragraph. Find the original source when possible. Ask what happened before the video began and what happened after it ended. Look for the sentence nobody included in the screenshot.

And allow myself the glorious freedom of occasionally saying, “Well, that wasn’t nearly as dramatic as the internet promised.”