Fake news travels fastest and furthest.
That was the conclusion of a major study from MIT, concluding that people prefer falsehoods over the truth.
This shouldn’t be earthshaking news to anyone who has spent a modicum of time in a junior high school cafeteria. However, MIT’s 10-year study revealed that falsehoods trump the truth across virtually all topical areas from urban legends and politics to business, technology and science.
For example, on Twitter, false claims were more than 70 percent more likely to be shared than the truth.
We humans (and we are driving this behavior, not bots sent from dingy Russian basements) prefer to traffic in falsehoods, because they are “novel” and “evoke more emotion,” MIT concluded.
Sports fans, representing the general population, enjoy sharing hoaxes, though this past April Fool’s Day weekend offered relatively slim pickings.
A few sports personalities and brands did dip a toe into potentially treacherous waters at a time when legions of keyboard warriors are itching to be outraged.
NASCAR driver Aric Almirola hawked Smithfield Brands new “Bacon Crisp Cereal”. New Orleans Pelican star Anthony Davis sent a video in which he appears to shave his famous eyebrow with a giant Red Bull towel dominating the frame. The Jacksonville Jaguars fake-tweeted a new uniform, a stunt that backfired among some fans who liked the faux duds more than the team’s actual uniforms.
The best April Fool’s Jokes, like the Fake News we often swallow hook, line, and sinker, are laid out with sensible logic and supposed facts, allowing them to juke our personal BS meters and gallop through cyberspace.
When Sean Gleason, CEO of Professional Bull Riders (PBR), informed fans via Facebook that the league has been growing so fast it was going to give them even more bang for the buck by doubling the amount of time required for every qualified ride from 8 to 16 seconds, well, the story seemed downright believable to many.
In the spirit of famed former New York electronics retailer, Krazy Eddie, running his Christmas Campaign in August, the league decided to capture fans’ attention by going extra early with its “bull” on Friday, March 30. Gleason teed up a legitimate web story, and in many quarters, all hell broke loose among fans caught completely off guard.
The official website story had realistic quotes from riders and stock contractors, peppered with several giveaway clues to the ruse. The bulls were not available for comment. Reigning PBR World Champion Jess Lockwood would debut the format this coming weekend in Sioux Falls on the bull named, “April Fool’s Day.”
Maybe it was in being out of the gate early on March 30, or the fact that bulls have some funky names (my favorite is the now-retired Chicken on A Chain). Or perhaps we are so intrigued by #FakeNews that our guard is permanently defective. Whatever the reason, many fans were hoodwinked, and PBR became the one league in 2018 to pull off a legitimate April Fool’s Joke.
Those who bought in were incredulous. The sport would be ruined for fixing what’s not broken! And already this season the increasingly powerful bulls have decimated the cowboys. As it is, half of the top 15 is out hurt! What happens when you ask these battered cowboys to ride another eight seconds?
Last Friday night in Sweden, the developer of PBR’s game 8 to Glory, saw the newsflash and went into a crisis mode. They immediately began designing graphics for a revised 16 to Glory game. April Fool’s Day is apparently not a thing in Scandinavia.
Next to the league’s 2018 schedule announcement, the rules-change ruse is the year’s most-read PBR web site news story. True to MIT’s findings, it generated the most pass along on Facebook and by far the most views for Gleason’s official CEO Facebook page.
PBR let the story and scattered confusion among its fan base ride all day Saturday. Then on Sunday, the league amended the headline to mention April Fool’s Day while Gleason wrote a Facebook post fessing up to the joke and thanking fans for having a little April 1 fun.
While the idea was creative, fun, and relevant in highlighting the core of a very simple sport – “making the eight” – PBR wishes it had done a few things differently.
The league’s head of PR, who came up with the concept, regrets not going bigger and bolder with social assets that can truly explode virally. Video of Jess Lockwood and rebel cowboy J.B. Mauney, the sport’s gun-slinging John Wayne, discussing the new rule, would have boosted engagement. (A video of Mauney’s adorable daughter practicing on a barrel has tallied PBR’s highest overall social engagement this year).
Then again, the old school “news story” approach likely contributed to fooling fans. In all, the ROI for PBR’s barebones gambit was quite good. At the sole costs of a few PBRs (Pabst Blue Ribbon, that is) consumed while the idea was concocted and the “news” written, the league got its furthest-reaching story of the year.
Being nothing but a bunch of #FakeNews, that shouldn’t surprise anyone.
