The Importance of A Google Search In an Era of Rage Bait

Put yourself in these shows. You are relaxing playing a video game when your friend sends you an article. He writes “Hey dude, you need to check this out, its crazy!!!” You trust your friend, so you look at the headline. Costco Guys to be Added to Mortal Kombat. You think “what, that’s crazy.” But you know that Mortal Kombat is known to be a little wacky, and that a lot of the newer guest characters come out of left field. So maybe it’s not that crazy. You bring it up to your fighting game friend and they say, “Dude, that is an article from Hard Drive.” You now feel foolish for not checking your sources and believing a piece of satire.

Of course this example is a little extreme (I purposely chose it because I found it funny). But do not let it distract you from how easy it is to fall for things online. So, pulling on Mike Caulfield’s and Sam Wineburg’s Verified, let’s look at some strategies to stay safe. 

Firstly, when presented with information, you can just do a quick google search. In this example, I searched “costco guys mk1,” which resulted in this:

The first 5 results do not bring up Costco Guys in Mortal Kombat. You actually have to scroll to see the Hard Drive article. (BTW I did check on google search, the first result is a Reddit post talking about it as a piece of satire).

See, when you’re presented with a claim, you need to consider the context. Verified writes that you need to consider the context of the source (where did you get it from), the context of the claim (what’s the larger story), and the context of you (what do you know and do you care). 

Further they say that you need to:

1. Stop. What do you know and do you know what you are looking at.
2. Investigate the source. I.E. where did it come from.
3. Find other coverage. 
4. Trace it back to the original source. 

So, how does this all relate to rage bait?

Rage-bait can be summarized as a tactic that uses your anger to get you to click. The falsity of the claim does not matter, only that it pulls on your emotions. Why am I specifically calling out rage-bait? Because I see it all of the time.

Here is where I want to emphasize the importance of step one of Verified’s SIFT method. Stop. Rage bait works because you stop thinking and act on your emotions. “I cannot believe he would say that!” “They’re doing what!” and so on are the types of comments you will see on rage-bait. When rage bait is small, there often is not a source. Instead, as the SIFT method says, stop and ask yourself “Do I care?” 

Of course, rage-bait is now being used in conjunction with politics. It has become a lot harder to say “No I do not care.” That is okay. Still, stop and ask “what am I looking at?” Take a second and pause, do not let your emotions dupe you. Then follow the other steps. You may discover that the article was not lying, so now you do have a right to be upset. But now, you can now you are upset correctly, and not getting mad at a boogie man someone made up.