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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.”
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.
The disagreements over how to respond to Bin Laden’s death throughout the online progressive circles I travel in have generally been expressed with a lot more emotional generosity and tact than the similar disagreements over the royal wedding. A big part of that is people’s acknowledgment that this is a big, complex, difficult issue about which people are bound to have strong and conflicting emotions.
There are some issues that we in progressive movements know we disagree on, and disagree on amicably. What gets us heated is when we disagree on something we thought we agreed on, or feel strongly that we should agree on. But the lesson to take away from those moments isn’t that some of us are fake progressives, but that ours is an ideologically diverse community.
That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try to convince each other, or even that we shouldn’t get upset about each others’ (perceived) blind spots. It just means that it’s more productive, more useful, and ultimately more intellectually and morally rigorous to approach those disagreements as disagreements that are occurring among people who share a lot of values but diverge on some issues, rather than as deviations from an agreed-upon political line.
(Adapted from two comments I left at Feministe this morning. Off to teach now, but I’ll try to update with some more thoughts specifically on how this relates to student organizing later this afternoon.)
Last post on the royal wedding, I promise. But I gotta get this off my chest.
By now, if you’ve read or seen any media coverage of the royal wedding at all, you know that two billion people watched it. Two billion people — thirty percent of the world’s population — stayed up late (California), got up early (Brazil), skipped lunch (Turkmenistan), or rushed home from work (Palau) to watch those two crazy kids get hitched. The spectacle united the world like few other events in history ever have.
Except there’s no reason to believe it’s true, and plenty of reason to doubt it.
The “stat” has been floating around the internet for weeks, ever since it appeared in a press release from Jeremy Hunt, Britain’s culture secretary. He didn’t say how he arrived at it, and as far as I’ve been able to tell nobody’s asked him since, but in the absence of any other information it’s been treated as fact.
Which, again, it’s not.
Viewership data is starting to dribble out now, and though there’s not much available yet, what’s been released shows just how ludicrous the claim actually is. Here are some examples:
- In Australia, a country of twenty-one million, about seven million watched. That’s a third of the population.
- In Canada, with about thirty-three million, about five million watched. That’s fifteen percent.
- In France, a country of some sixty million people, only two million watched. That’s about three percent.
- In India, with a population of 1.55 billion, viewership is estimated at forty-two million. That’s about four percent.
Sunday Update: Viewership in New Zealand was about thirty percent of the population. Viewership in the US was a bit over seven percent. Seven percent, after all that hype.
Again, to get to two billion people watching worldwide, you need global viewership in the range of thirty percent. You need the entire world to match the stats of Australia. Australia, an English-speaking country with strong ties to Britain. Australia, a developed country where television ownership is almost universal. Australia, a country whose monarch is the Queen of England.
Once you get outside the English-speaking world, viewership drops like a stone. Even Canada, a country with exceedingly strong cultural ties to Britain, watched at about half the rate needed to match the two billion number — because the timing of the event was inconvenient. (In Asia, where more than half of the world’s population lives, the wedding took place on Friday afternoon, when most people were at work or school.)
Why does any of this matter? Because the fiction that the whole world was fascinated by this wedding is an insidious, ethnocentric one. It depoliticizes and demarginalizes an event that was at its core both deeply political and — to most of the planet — strikingly marginal. It lends this trivial moment a weight and a significance that it doesn’t possess. It confuses us. It miseducates us. It renders us ignorant about the world we live in.
“Can’t I just calm down and enjoy the day? On a day when friends and fellow travellers have been beaten and arrested, no, I can’t. Sorry.”
–Laurie Penny, British journalist, gives her 140-character take.
There’s been a bit of a tussle in certain corners of the American progressive blogosphere over yesterday’s royal wedding.
I totally get the argument that everyone’s entitled to a bit of mindless cheesy celeb-gawking fun every once in a while. I totally get pomp. The wedding itself isn’t to my taste, but given my own pop culture preferences, I don’t really have any esthetic grounds for looking down my nose at it.
But here’s the thing. The British royal family has a long and sordid tradition of ethnic nastiness, a tradition that extends directly to this particular groom’s brother. It has a long and sordid tradition of sexual nastiness, a tradition that extends directly to this groom’s father’s treatment of this groom’s mother. It has a pretty long and sordid tradition of class-based nastiness, a tradition that absolutely and completely suffused yesterday’s spectacle.
Add to that the fact that the wedding is speculated to have cost the British taxpayer as much as fifty million pounds, at a time when Britain is slashing services to the poor. Add to THAT the fact that a huge number of left-wing activists in London were rounded up over the last week, in flagrant violation of their civil liberties, under the pretext of keeping things calm and cozy for the royals and their clique. Add to THAT the fact that each living Tory Prime Minister and ex-PM was invited to the wedding and neither of the two living Labor PMs were.
Add all that together, and I’d say that it’s at the very least an event that deserves some skeptical progressive analysis along with all the rah-rah.
The British understand this, by the way. UK media have been full of political analysis not only of the wedding itself, but also its reception. And that’s as it should be.
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