'Rick Perry in negotiations to accept medicaid expansion-Turning Texas Blue' proclaimed a diary that shot to the Rec List yesterday and was shared on facebook/twitter. No surprise on the response! We Texans are long overdue for progress in this red state. (Go, Wendy Davis!)
But it wasn't true. There was confusion...the diarist had not put on a snark tag. Granted, there were warning signs that the 'article' quoted was false. Big giveaway was a non-existent Texas newspaper. Some commenters tried to educate others on this tell. A look at the comments, though, and it's clear: many believed it.
Meanwhile, Trusted Users began adding tags reflecting the true nature of the diary. They also took their tags away, only for them to be added again later, by someone else (per the comments, the diarist never took part in the tagging).
Over the course of a few hours, the diary tipjar morphed. As more began to realize they had been duped, they retracted their recs. And the hide-rates rose. At my last count, the tipjar had 126 recs and 125 hides.
It was a fascinating, yet disappointing turn of events. As I watched the list fluctuate, I knew that some were not doing their due diligence (checking the validity of the article, questioning the hide-rates through comments). IndieGuy wrote a diary about it, informing Kossacks: http://www.dailykos.com/...
What really bothered me was the fact that the diary had (as of this am) been shared on twitter 64 times, and on facebook, 1000 times. Did you get that? 1000 times. And I wondered how many of those recs were based on what they thought was a true story? Comments in the diary bore that out. Some were furious when they realized they had shared something untrue.
So I wrote a diary last night, with a poll, hoping to get an idea of how many were reccing and sharing believing it to be true versus a snark story. Results beyond the orange.