Weekly Blog #7
I didn’t not create/spread a fake news story.
Instead, I found one that messed me up earlier this week. On Monday, a post on the Reddit thread r/rantGrumps popped up. R/rantGrumps is a subreddit that gives fans of the popular webshow series “Game Grumps” the chance to vent about problems they have with anything related to the show. The two hosts, Arin Hanson and Dan Avidan, have been hosting the show together since 2014.
However, following a year of weird accusations from Dan Avidan’s sexual partners about his “kinks” and “mishaps” in bed, someone finally accused him of something illegal. They claimed that since they were 17 in 2013, he had been grooming them to have sex with him. It wasn’t really the nature of the accusation that set the internet off, but it was the way things were pieced together as well as specific evidence that made the argument more convincing than it should have been.
This was not a fake story. But the conclusions drawn from it were. First, there was no evidence of grooming. Second, in order to see that the information pieced together in the original reddit post was insufficient to support its claim (which has now been deleted), you would have had to trace back links to other subreddits and tweets to realize that no such grooming occurred.
Of course, the internet jumped on this one. A public figure, especially one so beloved for being “imperfect,” is the perfect target for the internet to lambast. The Game Grumps public team handled the issue in the right way. Dan made a statement that what he did was “a shitty thing to do” but was not illegal nor any kind of sexual misconduct.
On Avidan’s most recent Instagram post, he received numerous amounts of comments expressing disappointment and anger towards the host. In retrospect, the community seems to regard the whole event as a giant overreaction — poking into someone’s private life and turning personal mistakes into potential career-ending episodes.
This event has really shown me that people will bandwagon something EVEN if they don’t want it to be true. I think it’s insane how many people won’t do their own homework, let alone comment on something without properly educating themselves on the matter. I’m not sure if it comes out of a desire to be the first person to shoot down something they see as a wrong OR social media’s tendency to say what is on its mind as quickly as possible.
