Here are a couple recent reminders of why you really shouldn’t trust everything you read On The Line.
1. Michael Hale, who runs a dumb-joke Twitter feed called dogboner, saw Neil deGrasse Tyson on a New York subway, took a photo of him, and Tweeted a dumb-joke Tweet calling Tyson “Some guy using his laptop on the train like a Dumbass nerd.” If only I were that funny I too could have nearly forty-thousand Twitter followers. But a lot of people didn’t get this humor and assumed Hale was playing it straight. Hale responded, “Bahaha I somehow fooled a bunch of people into thinking I’m an idiot just by acting really stupid.” Unless he didn’t really fool them, and they were all just carrying on the joke, in which case I’m the one now fooled. (Unless I’m just pretending to be fooled.) In any event, someone wasn’t grokking what was going on.
2. Michelle Fields, a media personality, thought one of her former Pepperdine professors called her a “full retard” on Twitter. But it’s unclear who posted the Tweet in question; see the Twitchy notes.
Anyway, if you’re not immediately skeptical of nearly everything you read on the Internet until you confirm the story, you’re not doing it right. Or you’re just playing games and reading joke sites, like a dumbass nerd.