Internet ‘truth’ and consequences

Opinion

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 23/01/2024 (605 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Jackson, the state capital of Mississippi, bills itself as “the city with soul.” It’s on the Pearl River, 290 kilometres north of New Orleans, a city replete with museums, the Mississippi Museum of Art, the Mississippi Civil Rights Museum and the Mississippi Children’s Museum among them.

If you want to know more, you can read some of Tripadvisor’s 20,955 customer reviews of Jackson’s hotels, attractions and restaurants.

Or you can picture it as the city partially drained by social media.

Welcome to the brave new world.

Jackson has had drinking water woes for years, enough so that in 2022, a U.S. federal order put the city’s water system under the control of a private company.

Last Thursday, there were more problems: about one-quarter of the city’s 52,000 water customers suddenly had no water — just dry taps.

The problem wasn’t with water pipelines — it was with a different kind of infrastructure.

A web-based one.

What played a large part in the Jackson water shutdown was what water company officials termed “a deliberate misinformation campaign.”

A Facebook post, in fact.

“Just got word they are about to shut off water in Jackson,” the post said. “If you’re in Jackson, fill up your tubs and jugs! Get prepared for not having water.”

Panicked, many people did exactly that. So many turned their taps full on and filled their tubs that the water system, already under strain from freezing temperatures, collapsed.

The rumour found fertile ground, perhaps because a summer 2022 water system failure had left some residents without safe drink water for days. It also found wide distribution, courtesy of Facebook.

Which is just the way Facebook and Twitter want things to work. Because what social media loves more than anything else is quantity, not quality. It doesn’t matter how spurious or unchecked someone’s message is, as long as it generates traffic for online advertising.

(It will be interesting, in the next few weeks, to see what role online rumours had in the ransacking of the downstairs of the Marlborough Hotel out in Winnipeg, where some protesters this weekend apparently believed they were ransacking a sex-trafficking site.)

Social media companies don’t see themselves as having a role in whether anything they publish is accurate — in fact, they deny having any role in what appears on their websites in any way.

They are, they maintain, merely pipelines, pipelines unaware of whether they’re pumping lies or bile or vomit or drinking water.

Drinking water?

Ah, yes. Back to Mississippi, and the online water rumour that’s now being investigated by law enforcement agencies.

The mainstream media wire service the Associated Press — not Facebook, not Twitter — tracked the post back to what appeared to be its original source, which turned out to be a former right-wing conservative Constitution party candidate named Bob Hickingbottom. Contacted by telephone by AP, Hickingbottom first denied posting the message, saying “Something like that would be outside the realm of civilized behaviour,” before admitting, in a subsequent call, that he had posted it, thinking he was helping the public.

So there is a chance, albeit a long shot, that someone will pay the piper for shutting down a state capital’s water system.

But not the social media giant that actively spread the misinformation — and profited from it.

Facebook will take the traffic all the way to the bank.

And in the process, it will take all the advertising money it can out of Jackson and back to head office, happy to get every penny that got pushed its way by a spurious online water rumour.

» Winnipeg Free Press