40 Times People And The Media Thought They Would Get Away With Their Lies Until Their Subjects Replied To Them First-Hand

Since 2013, the Quit Your BS forum has amassed more than 1.7M members. The subreddit started when user GreenMagine shared a Facebook conversation where one person was accused of lying about getting engaged. Another user responded to the post: "I wish there was a whole subreddit for this, like r/quityourb*****it or something. Or at least I hope the trend continues." Redditor (and now moderator) Doxep replied by saying that they created a forum with that exact name.

Ever since that day, the community has been growing strong and becoming one of the main places for people to call out any type of lies, fake news, and misinformation. And from the number of posts the members share, it seems that falsehoods online get shared all too often.  

A survey conducted by the Pew Research Center found that 64 percent of American adults said fabricated news stories were causing a great deal of confusion about the basic facts of current issues and events. They interviewed 500 people on landline telephones, and 502 on cellphones. The respondents came from different backgrounds, education levels, demographics, and had different incomes. 

While Americans are aware that these stories spread perplexity, they reveal a fair amount of confidence in their ability to detect such made-up tales. About four in ten respondents felt very certain that they can recognize fake stories, and another 45 percent felt somewhat confident. 

Generally, about a third of the US citizens confirmed they often stumble upon fabricated political news online. Pew Research Center explained that "it is difficult to measure the precise extent to which people actually see news that has been completely fabricated—given that news consumers could see but not recognize made-up news stories as well as mistake factual stories for false ones." Yet, these numbers show "a high-level sense of the public’s perception of this kind of content."

While some people take the time to fact-check and find out whether things we learn in the media are true or made-up, 23 percent of respondents revealed that they have shared fake news themselves. Some people did it knowingly, others explained that they only later realized that it was in fact false. "When it comes to how to prevent the spread of fake news, many Americans expect social networking sites, politicians, and the public itself to do their share," the researchers added. 

Fake news is definitely not a new threat. The term became Collins Dictionary’s word of the year in 2017 and kept popping up in the headlines ever since. While fake news exists across a variety of channels, much of the recent conversation about it involves social media platforms. 

Previously, Andrew Selepak, Ph.D., a program coordinator of Master’s in Social Media and a lecturer at the University of Florida, told Bored Panda that "everyone engages in self-image manipulation on social media. We highlight and promote our best moments while leaving out the bad or mundane." 

"Before social media, a person could tell a lie to another and then the exact opposite lie to someone else, and it is possible no one would know. But you cannot do this on social media because everyone you know finds out at once." 

He noted that the one great thing about the internet is that collectively, we can uncover falsehoods and those who spread them more than ever before. “If anything, social media may actually limit the amount of outright lying people do anymore because anything they say or post can be refuted by any and all of their followers rather than by one person,” the lecturer said. 

Andrew Selepak mentioned that lies on social media can be intentional or unintentional. For example, when we see a story criticizing a politician or sports team we don’t like, we will probably share it because we want it to be true: "We aren’t the originator of the lie, but we are spreading it because we didn’t do our due diligence to fact check it first." 

Yet, this is not as bad as being the creator of a lie. "Politicians, internet trolls, and influencers spread lies about issues like COVID-19, their political party or the opposition, or other major political issues, to manipulate the public." Such posts are dangerous because these people have a greater reach. Thus, their lies can be further spread by individuals who want to believe they're true.

“This is how fake news spreads,” Selepak explained. “But it can be difficult to combat fake news because as individuals we often don’t have reach as influencers. We can debunk and dispute lies, but not as many people will see it, and some might be more willing to believe the lie than the truth.” 

We are all impacted by dishonesty on social media. Selepak provided COVID-19 as an example: "those who were telling lies that Covid was spread through 5G towers led some to take down the towers for fear over the disease." He added that people also get hurt by encountering exaggerations online. "We know that celebrities have personal trainers, personal chefs, ... and Photoshopped images they post to social media that then receive thousands if not millions of likes on their post. Social media has a way of setting cultural norms on behavior, beauty, relevancy."

“When people, and especially young girls, see the fake body images presented on social media as the norm and forget that what they see on social media is not real, it impacts how they see their body, the bodies of others, and what they idealize as the beauty standard,” the lecturer said. “This is unhealthy and can lead to anxiety, depression, and eating disorders.”

While social media is full of dishonesty, “we cannot expect the platforms to remove all of this content, nor should we want them to. Social media should be a free speech space where ideas are debated and lies are publicly disputed,” Andrew Selepak concluded.