Can We Handle the Truth?

Matilda Jakovac

mj244121@ohio.edu

 I'll never forget a social media interaction that I had while living in Portland, Oregon in late 2020.

My boyfriend and I had just finished spending the day downtown. As I recall, we shopped at an outdoor recreation consignment store, walked along the waterfront, grabbed a bite to eat at a local food truck, and made a pit-stop at a marijuana dispensary.

You know, Portland things. 

It wasn't until I got home and opened social media on my phone that I remembered the propaganda circulating in response to the Black Lives Matter protests. I joked to my boyfriend, "oh that's right! The city's on fire. I forgot." 

In reality, the most excitement I had seen on our day out was a bluegrass band performing from the bed of a tiny, old, pickup truck and a group of at least 15 men dressed as Batman lining the pavement outside a popular donut shop. 

It didn't take long for a TikTok video to show up on my feed depicting "Portland rioters burning their own city to the ground!" The only problem was, the video clearly wasn't taken in Portland.

Now, if the headline had been something like "naked woman wearing gas mask performs ballet in front of police brigade", I would have thought "oh yeah, Naked Athena" and given the video a like.  THAT would be characteristic of a Portland protest.

Photo courtesy of Twitter.com/@CelinaTebor

Unfortunately, however, Naked Athena didn't gain much traction within the "Liberal City Overrun by ANTIFA" narrative. 

I don't usually engage in social media arguments-especially about politics-but on this occasion, I felt it was necessary to say something. At this point, Portlanders were getting fed up with our city being the poster child for right-wing propaganda and the spread of false information about the Black Lives Matter movement. 

That isn't to say that Portland didn't have protests which had unfortunately turned to riots in the past, but at this point, it had been months since a riot broke out. Despite what was being shown on the news, the city of Portland was NOT in fact burning to the ground!

Photo courtesy of TheWeek.com

After careful deliberation, I decided to comment something VERY controversial. I wrote "This isn't Portland."

To my defense, I really thought I was being as objective and uncontroversial as possible. After all, you can't argue with facts, right?

Wrong. 

Within hours, I had hundreds of responses to my comment and none of them were in agreement with my statement. The hate comments snowballed from the typical libtard insult to personal attacks on my appearance and even my name. 

Photo courtesy of memegenerator.net

Immediately, I considered deleting my comment. That's it, I thought. This is why I don't engage with political posts.

Then, I began to question my own intuition. Was I mistaken? Was I really unable to recognize the city I had grown up in?

I started clicking on the profiles of the people who had responded, and sure enough, none of the people who had commented with such confidence and assertion, were even from Portland. 

From there, I began scrolling through the other responses to the video and quickly found several people from Minneapolis commenting that they recognized the video. Someone even commented, "I know where this is. I live on this block."

It didn't take long to figure out that this video wasn't taken in Portland, this was a video of a riot in Minneapolis.

With the evidence right there, why were so many people still fueling the comment section with misinformation? It only took me a matter of seconds to understand that the video was taken in Minneapolis.

Surely other people commenting were able to come to the same conclusion. 

Photo courtesy of The Pride

In my opinion, the issue isn't always whether people are able to access factual information or differentiate between real news and fake news.  The issue is whether people are willing to accept the truth when it goes against their own beliefs.

In a time of clickbait, fake news, and deep fakes so compelling that even the most intelligent minds would struggle to spot the difference, let us not forget that we also have access to third-party fact checking websites like Snopes.  More importantly, we have the ability to think critically. 

The issue isn't whether or not we can find the truth, the issue is whether or not we want to.