Originally published on January 9, 2017
With Christmas out of the way and a new semester a week
away, I’ve been wracking my brain for a good topic to write about. So I went to
a place where I knew I could find a whole list of current news topics:
Facebook. Yeah, yeah. Facebook. I know. Not the most reliable fountain of news
sources. I took two articles from a particular trending topic because I wanted
to see for myself how reliable the sources actually were. Doing 10 seconds of
research instead of zero apparently puts me ahead of many reliable national
news networks, so I wanted to see what that was like. Basically, how factual
are clickbait trending topics I find on Facebook?
What’s the story that caught my eye? Titanic, of course. More specifically, the new revelation that says
the Titanic sank not because of
hitting an iceberg, but because of an onboard fire that had been slowly burning
even before it started that fateful maiden voyage. A documentary shedding light
on this new theory was broadcast in the UK on New Year’s Day. Titanic expert and journalist Senan
Molony decided to examine closely photographs of marks on the hull that
supports the idea of yes, the hull was torn open by the iceberg, but it was
already weak to begin with: a belowdecks fuel fire too hot to be controlled
that probably would have destroyed the ship before it reached New York, but
shh, don’t tell the passengers. This theory is not a new one; back in 2008 Titanic expert Ray Boston suggested the
fire started during trial runs. So any way you look at it, Titanic was doomed.
All this information came from an article on the UK online
newspaper Independent, and was the
first source to show up on Facebook regarding this topic. From what I can see,
digging around other parts of the site, it is a legitimate news source. It
included links to other articles and even had a video preview for the
documentary at the beginning. It’s a pretty solid article, and the kind of
thing that should be floating around Facebook. The other article that cluttered
the Facebook trending page for this topic was from a website called ViralSuper. Sounds super (ha) reliable!
This article was very different from the first, and not just because of the typos
and grammatical awkwardness of some of the sentences. It is rather short and contains
the bare bones of the information available, less that I provided in the
paragraph above. Half of theirs was a quote by Senan Molony. The facts seem
more or less accurate and it seems like a good article for someone who wants to
skim and get just the facts about a topic. The biggest difference is found in
the headlines. Independent includes the phrase “claim experts” while
ViralSuper’s headline says it sank due to fire, not iceberg, stating it as
fact. I wouldn’t call this clickbait exactly, but a little bit misleading. If
one was to just read the headline, they would not be getting the full story.
This was an interesting little experiment and I would
definitely try it again. While both sources seemed legitimate, there was
clearly a more sophisticated and reliable option. This was a pretty safe topic,
but what will happen on more divisive topics? It’s up to us to check before we
repost.
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