The Most Dangerous Game of Telephone

I’ll never forget the first time I witnessed a fight in my high school –– I had just bought a grilled cheese sandwich from the cafeteria, when all of a sudden I heard a loud cheer. As a curious freshman, I peered into the diag to find two senior girls wrestling amidst a crowd of onlookers.

I later discovered that these girls were fighting over a post uploaded to @gossipgirlmv, a popular Instagram account that posted fake gossip about students at my high school. Therefore, when one girl saw a picture of her boyfriend with another girl sitting alone in a car with a caption insinuating that he was cheating, she lost it.

Below is an example of a post from our sister high school’s gossip Instagram (@gossipgirlmv was deleted, so below is the best picture I could find).

As seen in the picture above, the account took innocent pictures and posted them with “scandalous” captions to spark controversy. Similarly, although @gossipgirlmv’s post did not actually display concrete evidence of infidelity, a suspicious photo with just the right caption was enough to make him look unfaithful *gasp*.

In a nearly identical situation, Christopher Blair, from Eli Saslow’s article “How Lies Become Truth in Online America”, finds entertainment in posting fake political news. In both cases, the rising popularity spurred crazier and more attention-seeking content. In the words of Blair, “The more extreme [he became], the more people believed it” (Saslow 1).

The fight I witnessed during lunch was just the start… The account started posting unflattering pictures of girls to kindle pregnancy rumors and even pictures of teachers speaking with students to spark dating rumors (see parallel from Gossip Girl below). Despite how many times people announced that a post was false, some students still believed @gossipgirlmv, using the feed as their People magazine.

Because it is difficult to determine the actual truth online, it becomes the reader’s responsibility to decipher between right and wrong. Consequently, it is easy for our subconscious to believe even the littlest things that validate our insecurities. In my @gossipgirlmv example, it is possible that the girlfriend already suspected that her boyfriend was cheating on her, so the post was an easy justification of her suspicions. Similarly, Shirley Chapian in Saslow’s article, believed that there was a prevalent threat of sharia (a fake disease) because there were “hundreds of stories” posted on Facebook. These posts “confirmed much of what she already believed” (Saslow 7). This gossip/fake news became their subjective truth.

This is why social media is the most dangerous game of Telephone. Telephone is a popular children’s game where players send a whisper down a line until the last person has heard the message, rarely the same as the original. In this case, the innocent image is the original message, social media is the middle of the line, and the reader is the last player. By the time the reader sees the post, the image is so misconstrued that the original meaning is completely lost. Social media is dangerous as people ultimately believe what they want to believe –– they are unable to recognize how distorted the original image has become, thus often mistaking their subjective truth as the absolute truth.