At first glance, the caption Reba McEntire posted on her Instagram account looks like a salacious tidbit from a gossip magazine.
Headlines claim McEntire, who performed “The Star-Spangled Banner” at the Super Bowl last month, called Taylor Swift an “entitled brat” because he “laughed and drank” during the performance. After McEntire posted the caption to her 2.6 million Instagram followers and praised Swift, multiple news outlets published reports that McEntire used her post to quash alleged feud rumors.
In her post, McEntire offers some good advice: “Don’t believe everything you read on the Internet.”
The title comes from a satirical account created on Facebook by self-proclaimed professional troll Christopher Blair.
He said she was too serious.
“I have to believe it was just a knee-jerk reaction or something. She thought it was horrible and she reacted,” Blair said of McEntire’s post. “On today’s Internet, you have to do better.”
A representative for McEntire declined to comment.
Blair ran some of the most successful satirical pages on the internet, targeting conservatives who wouldn’t click on his fictional and comical headlines. His main Facebook account, “America’s Last Line of Defense,” is part of a network of parody accounts, including one called “America Loves Freedom,” where he published McEntire’s article.
The pages linked back to his satirical news website, the Dunning-Kruger Times, which featured various fake news articles, nearly all of which were signed “Flag Eagleton – The Patriot.” . Blair warned readers on his page, account and website that “nothing on this page is true.”
While some may find Blair’s approach questionable, he complied with Facebook’s rules by disclosing at the top of the page that nothing he wrote was true – although that didn’t stop many from taking his article seriously.
These pages and McEntire’s posts shed light on the ongoing problems of social media, misinformation, and disinformation. Many experts continue to warn about how easily fake news can spread online, especially in the lead-up to a presidential election.
While Blair’s posts are generally benign fodder shared by quick-footed Facebook users, they show how easily some people can be fooled by misinformation.
Meta, meanwhile, has kept Facebook and its powerful recommendation system away from mainstream news outlets in recent years.
Blair calls his satirical page a “social experiment,” and he uses it for a very specific purpose: to deceive conservatives, particularly what he calls “elderly Trump supporters” who are too eager to dunk on the left.
“Believe it or not, the ultimate goal of this operation is the truth,” he said. “Those who tend to believe these stories are correct, and the more the stories confirm their biases, the less they need to prove it’s true.”
But Blair said his goal was not necessarily just to make statements about error and disinformation.
“The goal is that this is a libertarian troll honeypot that’s fun and makes a lot of money,” he laughs. “I try to make it as obvious as possible so that people like Reba McEntire, when something like this happens to them, they’re like, ‘Oh my God, who said that about me?’ And then they click and say, ‘Oh, these idiots.'”
Blair, a lifelong Democrat who started his page in January 2016, said he has had great success because of people’s desire to share his content without fact-checking. Engagement remains high, he says – his recent Facebook post jokingly claimed that singer Garth Brooks “looked tired, depressed and at least 40 or 50 inches overweight” at a recent show Pounds,” which received nearly 800 comments in 18 hours. He said his page can bring in $15,000 in revenue in a good month.
The problem of people taking misinformation at face value is now widely recognized. A 2021 study by a team of researchers from MIT, the University of Regina in Canada, the University of Exeter Business School in the UK, and the Center for Research and Teaching in Economics in Mexico found that 51.2% of participants Experiments shared misinformation online because they failed to pay attention to accuracy, not because they were unable to distinguish real news from fake news.
“People are often able to distinguish between real and fake news content, but they don’t even consider whether the content is accurate before sharing it on social media,” said study co-author Gordon Pennycook, assistant professor of behavioral sciences at the University of Regina. ”, told Nieman Labs in 2021.
Blair said he was surprised not only by McEntire’s reaction to the report, but also by how many news outlets reported that McEntire was quashing rumors of a feud with Swift without revealing that she was responding to a spoof The title is surprising.
“If everyone who reads my headlines and appears on my page complains about this and tells their followers that it’s not true, you’ll never hear anything except from me, ” Blair said. “I will be in the news non-stop.”