Two Columbus examples tell how today’s ‘fake news’ can be yesterday’s ‘urban legend’
We forget that some fake news not only isn’t true, it isn’t new.
Some of today’s fake news is yesterday’s urban legend, which prior to this post-Y2K world passed misinformation by word of mouth, at first, and then through early email.
Unlike many fake current events, urban legends typically were not aimed at spurring direct political action. Like a campfire ghost story, they were made to scare the target audience with a continuing threat, to put people on guard, so they’re glancing over their shoulders, into the dark unknown, and bracing for trouble.
Made up
Today we have an example we can study contemporaneously, meaning I just got it off Facebook, where it spread like measles. It’s titled “Piggly wiggly in Columbus” and says “Sapphire Hodges” posted it Tuesday afternoon at 3:43:
“So for those who … didn’t see it on the news. According to the cop, she was stalking us in the grocery store. And literally waited for the right time, I turned my back for five seconds to get a gallon of milk. I had Logan in the seat part of the cart, and Sadie in the buggie, Luckily, people I know where there, bc I started screaming when I looked at the basket and Sadie was gone, the lady that knows my kids and I, saw the lady trying to walk out the store with my daughter, and she started yelling…. The lady started running, and got all the way to the parking lot with Sadie before she dropped her with a cop running after her.… a different cop caught her though, about 5 minutes later…. People of Columbus, the women and child sex trafficking is spreading from Atlanta into Columbus. Please watch your children.”
Before I called detectives to confirm this was fake, several savvy social media consumers said it sounded like a hoax, noting it was shared as a screenshot, not a redirect from the original post, so no one could click on the author’s name to check the source.
The fable has other telltale signs of urban legendry, akin to this ominous rumor that spread back in the 1980s and ‘90s, when the city’s first mall, Columbus Square, yet remained on Macon Road, where the library stands today:
Gang initiates are hiding under vehicles in the mall parking lot, where they slash the ankles of women returning to their cars, and when the women reach down to feel the cut, the youths cut off a finger to take back to the gang.
This was obvious race-baiting, because the shopper was always a white woman and the gang recruit a black teen. But in common both were fictional: No generation of Columbus women is missing fingers from the Great Mall Gang Maiming.
Warning signs
Still the story spread like a contagion, years before it had an online vector for going viral. That such a saga could infect the public’s fancy had us looking for symptoms of the apocryphal, which the mall gangster and grocery baby grabber both illustrate.
- Second hand: The urban folk tale happened to a second cousin or a neighbor’s wife, never to the teller. It’s hearsay. On Facebook, it’s a screenshot.
- Retail setting: Both stories involve women shopping. Lurid accounts of women assaulted at shopping malls date back to the 1950s and ‘60s, when malls became fashionable. Note the time and place for the attempted child abduction: a grocery store the week before Thanksgiving.
- Missing details: The mall stories never named a victim or date anyone could check. The grocery kidnapping has children’s names, a grocery chain, a posting date, but no store address, no specific news report, no name of any witness, cop or suspect.
- Popular menace: The mall gang story spread when gang violence was trending. The milk-aisle kidnapper debuts during a media focus on sex trafficking, another contemporaneous evil.
A Facebook friend asked why someone would make this stuff up. I’m no psychologist, but I have to ask: How did that make you feel? Scared? Nervous? Wary? Paranoid?
Did it make you think that society’s falling apart – that predators lurk over your shoulder and hide under your car? How do you react to that?
The content of our ghost stories is measured by the retinue of characters it leaves in our heads, and whether we cast others in that shadow.