FAKE NEWS!

A Bipartisan Issue

Earlier this week, I unintentionally became a national troll. It was like getting called up to the big leagues from my usual trolling grounds on Facebook, aimed at my (mostly) annoyed friends, family, and acquaintances. The ones that haven’t blocked or hidden me yet, at least.

I posted a fake ad on Craigslist, seeking "seat fillers and extras" for an event supposedly being held in Washington, D.C., on June 14th. The listing offered payments (in cryptocurrency) for patriotic-looking individuals, especially those who are people of color or ethnically diverse. It was entirely fabricated. Within 24 hours, the post had spread across social media, forums, and fringe news sites. Outrage followed. "See!" some declared. "Trump can’t even draw a crowd without paying people!"

But here’s the twist: I created the ad in response to another viral post, one recruiting "paid protesters" for the ongoing protests in Los Angeles. A friend on Facebook had shared a story about being contacted by an organizer for counter-protests happening across the country on the same day. He claimed that he was offered a paid position to participate as a veteran. I expressed skepticism. Would a liberal group really recruit a registered Republican veteran to support their cause? Or was someone trying to spark conspiracy theories? My troll brain took over.

During the thread, someone chimed in with a screenshot of a Craigslist ad offering to pay people to protest in L.A. People were convinced. They cited it as proof of the “deep state” and “George Soros” manipulating events. “Who is funding this?” someone asked. That was it. I was disgusted by how quickly this group clung to an unverified image and turned it into gospel truth. So I decided to prove a point: anyone can post a Craigslist ad. All it takes is $7 and a little imagination.

Initially, I just wanted to troll this small group, post something so obviously satirical that only the willfully gullible would bite. A little chuckle at my own cleverness was all I was seeking, nothing more. After this, I shared the ad with a few friends in a Facebook group, fully expecting it to be a minor blip. I forgot about it by the end of the day.

Cut to the next morning. One of those friends from my small group commented with a link: my ad was gaining traction. A quick Google search revealed it had gone viral. My clearly fake post, even featuring a photo of a Russian military parade, was being shared across platforms, discussed by media outlets and mentioned in government meetings. TMZ reportedly reached out to the White House about it. My burner email, used to create the ad, was overwhelmed, thousands of messages flooded in.

While I expected some trolling in return, what surprised me most was that 90% of the emails appeared to be genuine inquiries. People actually wanted the gig. Others hoped to reserve seats at the event with the goal of not showing up, sabotaging the organizers. Ironically, they believed they were trolling a fake event, and so, the fake ad became a social experiment.

The experiment revealed something both obvious and alarming: fake news is not the exclusive weakness of one political tribe, it is a national (if not global) vulnerability, exploited not only by algorithms but by our own desire to see the worst in each other.

It turns out, confirmation bias doesn’t lean red or blue, it just leans easy. The same people who demand empirical evidence for climate science will repost a blurry Craigslist screenshot like it’sthe Rosetta Stone. And those who pride themselves on media literacy will eagerly share a clearly satirical ad if it embarrasses their ideological opponents.

What we’re seeing isn’t a partisan divide, it’s a shared psychological affliction: a hunger for stories that validate our worldviews, no matter how absurd their origin.

Social media hasn’t merely accelerated this behavior, it’s industrialized it. Each post is an attempt to crack the algorithm, truth and facts be damned. Clicks are currency. Outrage gets clicks. Nuance gets buried. Viral wins. Verified vanishes.

We’ve become a society that doesn’t just fall for fake news, we crave it, so long as it flatters our worldview and humiliates the other side. Fact-checking is passé. Satire is indistinguishable from journalism. Critical thinking, once a civic virtue, now plays second fiddle to the performance of outrage.

The consequences aren’t abstract. Fake information now shapes real beliefs, voting behavior, and public discourse. It fuels protests and counter-protests, erodes institutional trust, and fractures relationships. We are no longer debating ideas, we are reacting to headlines, many of which were never true to begin with.

We are drifting into a cultural moment where families splinter over memes, conspiracy theories get prime-time exposure, and national crises (pandemics, wars, climate disasters) are judged not by their human cost, but by their meme potential.

And yet, we tell ourselves we’re informed. We scroll through curated feeds, immersed in algorithmically reinforced echo chambers, mistaking viral content for verified fact. We’re not choosing truth, we’re choosing teams.

This isn’t a liberal failure. Nor is it a conservative one. It’s a human one. One we’ve allowed to metastasize in the petri dish of social media. We are so eager to believe the worst in others that we surrender our logic, our skepticism, and occasionally, our dignity, in exchange for the brief satisfaction of ideological triumph.

So what can we do?

We can begin by acknowledging our own susceptibility. Our brains are wired to seek patterns, especially ones that make us feel morally superior. We can pause before sharing. We can read the article instead of just the headline. We can restore critical thinking not as a threat to our beliefs, but as a tool to protect them.

And maybe *just maybe* we stop using Craigslist ads as smoking guns in imaginary conspiracies about shadowy government operatives.

We can’t algorithm our way out of this. But we can start by holding ourselves, not just each other, to a higher standard.

Until then, I’ll be here. Trolling my Facebook feed and seeing how many of my friends and family I can get to hide me from their timelines.

https://washingtondc.craigslist.org/doc/tlg/d/washington-seat-fillers-needed-june/7857143452.html