If you checked in on Twitter on Friday, you may have wondered why gorillas were dominating your feed. The reason? Well, some would call it fake news.
With the public, especially journalists, obsessing over “Fire and Fury,” the new Trump presidency tell-all from media writer Michael Wolff, one Twitter user decided to write up a fake excerpt from the book claiming that Trump is a fan of a fictional “gorilla channel.” This forced White House aides to set up a gorilla feed that he proceeded to watch for 17 hours straight, according to the fake excerpt.
The original tweet, posted by cartoonist Ben Ward, was retweeted over 20,000 times.
Wow, this extract from Wolff’s book is a shocking insight into Trump’s mind: pic.twitter.com/1ZecclggSa
— pixelated boat (@pixelatedboat) January 5, 2018
He admitted to fabricating the excerpt in a subsequent tweet that was retweeted less than 2,000 times.
tfw you parody a guy making up shit about Trump but people believe it so you become part of the problem
— pixelated boat (@pixelatedboat) January 5, 2018
Twitter was so taken with the new (fake) nugget from Wolff’s much-anticipated book that gorilla channel became a trending topic on Friday. Some users delighted in the joke, with one person tweeting at Spectrum to ask why the gorilla channel was not a part of his cable bundle. Spectrum’s support team couldn’t resist joining in the fun.
I pay @GetSpectrum over $220 a month!!! Where is my #GorillaChannel ???
— scott solomon (@onword47) January 5, 2018
Thank you for contacting us. The easiest way to request a channel be added to your current lineup is to click on the following link and fill out the request information. https://t.co/djbF65eQZ4. ^JK
— Ask Spectrum (@Ask_Spectrum) January 5, 2018
But the confusion raised serious concerns among other Twitter users. If the idea that Trump would watch 17 hours of gorilla footage is believable to so many people, they wondered, what does that say about our collective faith in the president?
I did not realize it was a joke until I read the comments!! We're so far down the rabbit hole, this seemed completely believable. What's happening to us????
— Christy (@cameobraid) January 5, 2018
Others pointed to the gorilla channel case as an example of how easily misinformation can spread on a medium like Twitter.
A sad commentary on both people's vulnerability to misinformation and what now seems plausible about the President of the United States https://t.co/BdYwdMBfRV
— Brendan Nyhan (@BrendanNyhan) January 5, 2018
Don’t tweet screenshots of fake text (of book excerpts, court transcripts, etc) even as a joke.
You’re making things worse.
The jokes just don’t work in a partisan-echo-chamber-feed world where everything is divorced from context and authorship.
Also they’re not funny
— Farhad Manjoo: like, very smart. (@fmanjoo) January 5, 2018
“On Twitter everything looks exactly the same so it’s hard to distinguish,” Daniel Funke, a reporter at Poynter, told MediaFile in a interview. Funke writes about misinformation and fact checking for the International Fact-Checking Network at Poynter.
Funke sees the gorilla channel story as an example of how easy it is for misinformation to spread on social media, although he noted that this was not one of the biggest cases of misinformation spreading online. Still, the gorilla channel story had a surprisingly wide reach.
“There are mainstream reporters who didn’t really know if it was real or not,” said Funke. “But then again that might be a joke, too.”