A post shared 4.7 million times this week — a post that three independent fact-checking organizations have confirmed contains no accurate statistics, at least two invented studies, a quote attributed to a senator who does not exist, and a graph that appears to have been created in Microsoft Paint — has nonetheless been described by 89% of people who read it as “basically true” and by a disturbing number of economists as “capturing something real about the current moment, even if every number in it is wrong.”
The post, which cannot be reproduced here for reasons that will become apparent, claims — falsely — that the average American family now spends 73% of its income on “survival expenses” (the actual figure is closer to 54%, which is its own story), that the median worker has not received a real wage increase since 1987 (the actual date economists use is more recent, though the trajectory is, concededly, grim), and that a fictional Congressman named “Rep. Brad Walton” introduced a bill to give Fortune 500 companies a tax credit for outsourcing jobs, which did not happen but which, multiple actual economists conceded off the record, “is the kind of thing that happens, just with different details and more paperwork.”
The post ends with the sentence: “They are not even hiding it anymore.” This sentence is not verifiable or falsifiable. It has been screenshotted 900,000 times.
The Fact-Checkers’ Dilemma
The fact-checking organization Veritas Now published a detailed 14-point refutation of the post’s claims on Wednesday, rating it “False” overall and walking through each specific inaccuracy with careful sourcing and appropriate nuance.
The refutation was shared 12,000 times.
The false post was shared 4.7 million times.
“I’ve been doing this for nine years,” said Veritas Now senior editor Julia Park, who wrote the refutation and who sounded, in a phone interview, like someone who has been doing something for nine years and is now in a complex relationship with the fundamental epistemology of the project. “The problem isn’t that people don’t trust facts. It’s that the facts don’t always explain why people feel the way they feel. The post is wrong. The feeling it describes is real. And people are choosing to share the wrong thing because it names the real feeling, and the correct thing doesn’t.”
She paused.
“I need a different career,” she added. “Not really. But sometimes.”
What The Post Got Wrong Versus What It Got Right
The actual economic data, assembled by Supposedly News from government and academic sources, tells a story that is more complicated than the post, less emotionally legible, and arguably more alarming in ways that are harder to fit into a shareable image.
Real wages for workers without college degrees have increased by approximately 8% since 1987 when adjusted for inflation, a figure that sounds positive until you learn that productivity — the amount of economic value those workers generate — has increased by approximately 70% over the same period. Housing costs as a percentage of median income have doubled. Healthcare costs as a percentage of family budgets have tripled in metropolitan areas. The wealth share held by the bottom 50% of Americans has remained essentially flat while the wealth share held by the top 1% has grown substantially.
None of this fits in a shareable image. Some of it has been covered extensively in publications that most people don’t read. All of it is real.
The fake post, with its invented statistics and nonexistent congressman, captured the emotional texture of this data more effectively than the data itself.
“This is the thing that keeps me up at night,” said Dr. Raj Mehta, a communications researcher at NYU. “Not the misinformation, per se. The misinformation is a symptom. The underlying condition is that the true version of reality is so complex and so poorly communicated that people are filling the gap with things that feel true even if they aren’t. We have a truth-legibility crisis, not just a misinformation crisis.”
The Post’s Author
The post was created by a 19-year-old in Oklahoma named Tyler, who made it in approximately 25 minutes while watching television, based on “stuff I’ve kind of heard.” Tyler was surprised it went viral. He is not an economist. He is not sure where the 73% figure came from. He stands by the general vibe.
“I mean, it’s rough out there,” Tyler said. “I was just trying to say it’s rough out there.”
It is, all available data confirms, rough out there.
The fake post got that part right.
This opinion column was written by Agnes Unnamed. Agnes Unnamed declines to be named. The views expressed are the views of the facts, which are having a difficult time being heard right now.