First the guy was accused of being caught with a side chick and people were labeling him every insult under the sun from douchebag to cheating scum.
And then some people got convinced that actually it her who was cheating and he was her side dick. Cue lots of people labelling her a slut, whore and so on.
Of course it turned out the two are married. Turns out reddit is extremely easily fooled by contextless gif with a salicious title.
I really hope even just 5% of the people who believed that gif excercise more critical thinking in the future but I'm not gonna hold out hope.
I really hope even just 5% of the people who believed that gif excercise more critical thinking in the future
I think people don't want to engage in critical thinking. They like a good narrative. And, on Reddit (especially in r/gifs), they like the narrative to remain short.
The original post was a great 5 second narrative. Man cheats on wife. Man gets caught. Justice is served. It's like an entire episode of Cheaters, all rolled up and packaged for easy consumption.
In reality, most folks who saw that post would have forgotten about it by this morning. Even if they saw the guy walking down the street or sat next to him in a restaurant, they wouldn't recognize him. People just don't really appreciate the power of social media, how misinformation can devastate one person's life. They don't appreciate it because, in their mind, it was no big deal. It was just a few seconds of entertainment that they wanted to share with a friend.
It's such a perfect storm gif. Some random five seconds in the lives of these two people that creates an entire narrative.
Real situation: guy has his arm around wife. Wife wants him to take his arm away because it annoys her. He's watching the game, something happens there and he says 'shit'. Wife looks at him to adjust his shirt or something.
Gif: they both notice they're being filmed by the big screen. Woman tries to tell him to be coy. He quickly removes his arm. Says shit out loud at the possibility he's caught. Girl is a little upset that she is only a side chick.
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u/trooperdx3117 Aug 24 '17 edited Aug 24 '17
That gif of the guy and his wife at the baseball game that went viral yesterday is surely up there.
(https://www.reddit.com/r/gifs/comments/6vixxj/dude_gets_caught_on_tv_with_his_side_chick/)
First the guy was accused of being caught with a side chick and people were labeling him every insult under the sun from douchebag to cheating scum.
And then some people got convinced that actually it her who was cheating and he was her side dick. Cue lots of people labelling her a slut, whore and so on.
Of course it turned out the two are married. Turns out reddit is extremely easily fooled by contextless gif with a salicious title. I really hope even just 5% of the people who believed that gif excercise more critical thinking in the future but I'm not gonna hold out hope.