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Yesterday Yahoo put up a post on its search blog titled “Teens Don’t Know Who Osama Bin Laden Is, According to Yahoo! Search Trends.”
The story has been picked up by a long list of other outlets — PC Magazine and Gawker both claimed that “many” teens don’t know who Bin Laden was, while one site went so far as to claim that a “majority” are unaware. BoingBoing hedged its bets, claiming that “a non-insignificant number of teenagers in America do not know who Osama bin Laden is.”
But what did Yahoo’s published data actually show?
Not much, it turns out. According to the blogpost, “who is osama bin laden” was the fifth-most searched question relating to Bin Laden on Sunday, which made it more popular than questions about his height, but more popular than questions about his age. How many people searched that question? Yahoo doesn’t say. Could have been millions, could have been a handful. What it does say is that two thirds of those searching were between the ages of 13 and 17.
As for what this factoid means, I have a few thoughts. First of all, as I’ve suggested above, it doesn’t mean that large numbers of teens were asking this question. Again, we just don’t have any data on that. Also, even the fact that a high proportion of askers were young teens is ambiguous — I’d be inclined to guess that young people are more likely than older people to phrase search queries as questions. If that’s true, then the stat makes teens look comparatively less informed, because it excludes all the fortysomethings who didn’t recognize the name and just searched “osama bin laden” to find out.
I’d also question the assumption that anyone searching on “who is osama bin laden” has no idea who Bin Laden was. A Google search on the question shows that at various times in the last ten years it’s been asked by, among others, BBC News, the PBS Frontline documentary series, and the Canadian Broadcasting Commission.
“Who is Osama Bin Laden,” in other words, can be, and often is, used as a synonym for “Tell me some stuff about Osama Bin Laden.” And “tell me some stuff about Osama Bin Laden” is a perfectly reasonable request for a thirteen-year-old to have made last Sunday night.
Over at Mother Jones, Kevin Drum has pointed out that September 11, 2001 was almost ten years ago, and that for many of the folks in the 13-to-17 age bracket, it’s been a really long time since he was in the news. That’s a good point, and it would be worth pointing out if it had been demonstrated, as Drum suggests, that “a goodly number of teenagers don’t know who Osama bin Laden is.”
That’s the thing, though. It hasn’t.
Update | TechPresident covers much the same ground, with this lovely zinger: “We could just as easily reading the data as ‘Teenagers Eagerly Search Out Information on Current World Events, and Good for Them.’
Second Update | Inspired by Judith Butlertron’s suggestion, I just did Google searches on “who is barack obama” and “barack obama.” Turns out that adding the “who is” skews the results toward third-party, informational sources, and away from DNC/White House promotional materials. So the joke is on Yahoo, and everyone who promoted this meme — if you want to learn more about someone, starting your search with “who is…” appears to be the internet-savvy way to go about it.
Third Update | The ignorance being expressed in these snark stories really is astounding. Britain’s Daily Mail newspaper says, on no evidence at all, that teens “flooded … the internet” with “who is osama bin laden” queries, while Good magazine claims “thousands” asked the question. Good also claims that it’s “the fifth most popular Osama search,” rather than the fifth most popular Osama question, which is a very different thing. Glenn Beck has gotten into the act too, claiming — falsely — that the query “was one of the most popular tweets and searches over the past few days.”
Fourth Update | Oof. Megan McArdle of the Atlantic, who uncovered the fake MLK/OBL quote earlier this week, has fallen for the Yahoo crap. Worse yet, she’s titled her blogpost on the story “Youth Culture.”
Adapted from a comment I just left at Feministe.
You probably can’t make yourself non-racist, but you can make yourself anti-racist. And in the end, being anti-racist is actually more important.
And no, you can’t ever rid yourself of privilege completely. But you can go a long way to rid yourself of ignorance of that privilege.
More to the point, you can make yourself into an opponent of privilege as it exists in the world, rather than just as it exists in you.
Jill hit the nail on the head when she said that the struggle to be — and to be seen as — “one of the good ones” can be a distraction from the real work of the activist. When you find stuff that needs doing, figure out how to help, and get to work on helping, that’s activism. Checking your privilege isn’t activism. It’s a part (and an ongoing part) of the process, but it’s not an end in itself.
And one last thing: As a person with privilege, if you spend time in progressive spaces, you’re going to get yelled at every once in a while. Sometimes people will be right to yell at you. Sometimes they’ll be out of line. Staying open to both possibilities is important, but it’s even more important to learn how to distinguish between them — and to figure out how to respond to each in a productive and self-caring way.
So that “I will not rejoice” quote that everyone reposted yesterday wasn’t from Martin Luther King, it turns out. Instead, it looks like it originated with a young woman in Pennsylvania who had no intention of hoaxing anyone. She just posted her own thoughts on Bin Laden’s death to Facebook, and the rest is internet history.
If your Twitter feed and Facebook page look anything like mine, yesterday various versions of the quote were all over both:
“I mourn the loss of thousands of precious lives, but I will not rejoice in the death of one, not even an enemy. Returning hate for hate multiplies hate, adding deeper darkness to a night already devoid of stars. Darkness cannot drive out darkness: only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate: only love can do that.” –Martin Luther King, Jr.
The problem is, though, that King never said that. Or rather, he said the last three sentences, but not the first.
The bulk of the quote comes from a 1957 Christmas sermon of King’s, in the following context: “Let us move now from the practical how to the theoretical why: Why should we love our enemies? The first reason is fairly obvious. Returning hate for hate multiplies hate…” But the beginning part, the “I mourn the loss of thousands of precious lives, but I will not rejoice in the death of one, not even an enemy” part — the part that seems to apply most directly to the death of Bin Laden — appears nowhere in King’s writings, nor does it appear anywhere online before yesterday.
So where did it come from? The Atlantic’s Megan McArdle, who was the first to pick up on the quote’s falsity, tried and failed to track it down. About an hour ago, Drew Grant at Salon claimed that magician/objectivist/prankster Penn Jillette was the first one to post it to Twitter, saying he suspected that “Penn just made it up in order to see how many people would blindly follow along and quote it as fact, without ever checking up on the sources.” (Penn quoted only the first sentence — the part that’s not King’s at all.)
Penn denies making anything up, though, and has in fact gone into full self-flagellation mode on Twitter. And by the time Grant posted, someone else had come forward with what looks to me like a more plausible explanation:
Late last night Jessica Dovey, a recent college grad from Pennsylvania, sent Penn a tweet saying that the quote was hers, posting a screenshot from her Facebook page explaining how the confusion started. Here’s what went down, she says.
Early yesterday afternoon she posted a status update to Facebook that read like this:
I mourn the loss of thousands of precious lives, but I will not rejoice in the death of one, not even an enemy. “Returning hate for hate multiplies hate, adding deeper darkness to a night already devoid of stars. Darkness cannot drive out darkness: only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate: only love can do that.” MLK jr
Note the location of the first quote mark. Dovey wrote the first sentence as an expression of her own views, appending the King quote as a further explanation.
I haven’t seen any evidence to back this claim up, and it’s possible it’s a hoax of its own — I just tweeted Dovey to ask her for more info — but my first reaction is that this seems completely plausible. The original quote, as McArdle pointed out, never quite rang true. In addition to the weird specificity, there’s an abruptness to the transition that clangs a little against the mind. But when you move the quote mark, that abruptness disappears, and the whole thing flows.
More generally, it’s my experience that a lot of these false facts start out just this way — not with a conscious attempt to propagate a lie, but with something that gets misquoted, misunderstood, or misrepresented entirely by accident. We’ve seen this happen with stories as different as the beer pong herpes scare of 2009 and the claim that only 4.7% of American blacks voted in the 2010 elections.
It’s hard to get a hoax right when you’re doing it on purpose, but it’s weirdly easy to get one going by accident.
Four McGill students, including the co-presidents of the university’s New Democratic Party Club, were elected to serve in Canada’s national parliament last night.
The New Democratic Party, long a marginal player in Canadian politics, made stunning gains last night, nearly doubling its previous best-ever vote percentage and almost tripling the number of seats it holds in parliament. With the Conservative Party winning a governing majority, the NDP now stands as Canada’s official opposition for the first time.
These gains came largely at the expense of the Quebec nationalist party Bloc Québécois, whose support collapsed to less than one fourth of voters in its home province. The NDP took 45 of its 68 new seats nationally from the BC, and the wave of voter support that carried it to that result often brought victory to candidates who had entered the race with no expectation of winning.
The most notorious example of this is Ruth Ellen Brousseau, an NDP candidate who lives a three-hour drive away from her district, works full-time in a bar, and left the country for a Las Vegas family vacation in the middle of the campaign. Despite not giving any interviews or campaigning in her district — and despite rumors that in a Francophone district she speaks only clumsy French — Brousseau won election last night with forty percent of the vote.
The student winners’ stories aren’t as colorful, but they’re no less weird. Charmaine Borg, the new MP for Terrebonne-Blainville, has a four-sentence bio on the NDP website. Matthew Dubé had just 87 Twitter followers on election day … and apparently took down his Twitter account that night. Laurin Liu ran for (and won) re-election to the board of directors of McGill’s student radio station just a few weeks ago.
As co-presidents of the McGill NDP club, Dubé and Borg apparently spent most of their time this election working to re-elect a local NDP incumbent, not even mentioning their own candidacies in an April 5 student newspaper article on the campaign.
Each of these three candidates now must make plans to move to Ottawa to begin a career as a legislator, a job that carries a $157,731 annual salary.
I haven’t been able to find any of the new legislators’ ages online, by the way, but eligibility won’t be a problem — any Canadian citizen 18 years old or older is eligible to serve in parliament. (In the US, in contrast, you need to be 25 to serve in the House of Representatives.)
Guy: “The audience suggestion is ‘Slingblade and Oprah on a date.'”
Liz Lemon, as Billy Bob Thornton: “I sure do like them french fried pertaters.”
Jenna Maroney: “No you don’t, Oprah!”
• • •
There’s a rule in improv: Never say no. Whatever premise your partner comes up with — whatever setting, whatever action, whatever character — you validate it and expand on it. Instead of saying “no,” you say “yes, and…” This is harder than it sounds. We’re accustomed to the idea that drama and comedy both grow out of conflict, that disagreement is the meat of communication.
Really committing to “yes, and” is terrifying. But it’s also thrilling, because a dialogue built around “yes, and” is a dialogue built on trust and on partnership. It’s a dialogue built collaboratively rather than adversarially. It’s harder to do it that way, but when it works it’s incredibly satisfying.
I wrote a piece this morning about some of the ways in which progressives have been arguing this week, and Jill Filipovic of Feministe just put up a much longer, more thoughtful post that started from a similar place. A common thread running through both of those essays is an exasperation with gotcha discourse, with what Jill describes as a culture of “calling out.”
As Jill notes, there’s a strong desire among a lot of progressives to be — and be seen as — “one of the good ones,” and calling out people who are Doing It Wrong can feel like a shortcut to that identity. There’s also, I think, something deeper acting as well. Calling people out is a model for political dialogue that we intuitively understand, one that’s validated everywhere we look, one that feeds our desire for recognition and attention. It’s also, as the improv analogue suggests, a habit of discourse that’s ingrained in all of us, and one that’s not easy to break free of even when we’re making a conscious effort. We’re addicted to the “no” in politics and our personal lives no less than in performance.
But what happens when we opt for the “yes, and” instead? What happens when we try to construct a discussion — even a discussion in a blog’s commenting space — as an act of collaboration?
We can see a glimpse of what that looks like in the comments to last night’s Feministe post on Bin Laden’s capture. People were coming from very different places on the subject, but for the most part they recognized it as a topic on which good people could disagree, and disagree passionately. There’s a lot of “but…” in the thread, a lot of “on the other hand…” a lot of “at the same time…”
What those comments show us as well, though, is how fragile that sense of community can be. The further down one gets in the thread, the more snark and calling out there is. It’s hard to keep saying “yes, and” when the people around you keep giving you “no.”
Obviously not every statement can or should be “yes, anded” anyway. Sometimes folks are so deeply ignorant or hateful that they have to be challenged aggressively. But if you compare the first half of that thread to the second half, or compare that thread to recent Feministe discussions of the royal wedding, what you see are differences that are far less about the content of the statements people are making than about the premises they are bringing to the table about who they are talking to and what the purpose of the talking is.
Jill referred to calling out as “a stand-in for actual activism” in her post this morning, and closed by suggesting that “it’s high past time we stopped thinking of call-outs and privilege-owning as the best way to do activism online.” I think she’s right, and I think there’s something important to be added, too. The work of “yes, and” — the work of communicating collaboratively, of finding and building common ground, of moving from distrust to trust — that work is real activism. It’s movement-building work, and it’s important.
“Our ultimate end,” as Dr. King once said, “must be the creation of the beloved community.”
studentactivism.net 
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