Welcome to the content machine, where the headlines are made up, and the body of your article doesn’t matter.
This article may be posted with a catchy headline to get you to stop and click while frantically scrolling during your second poop break of the morning. But it’s the nature of the beast. Rawr!
Now, I’m not a basketball writer; I’m what most NBA fans on Twitter would affectionately call a “casual”. But I am a Toronto Raptors fan, and thanks to the glorious algorithms of the internet, I get a steady stream of Raptors-related content. My newfound interest in life is how information spreads and how rumours become a reality of their own.
On May 31st, Bleacher Report writer Jake Fischer posted an article with a click-worthy headline; “Does OG Anunoby want out of Toronto?”
Oh no! Not OG! Not the man with the freshest scarf game in the NBA!
Fresh. To. Death.
Except, as the third paragraph of the article states:
There you go, a headline and a section that directly answers the question right away. No, OG Anunoby had not said anything about wanting out of Toronto, and the only sources saying he did likely people on the outside trying to stir up some rumours and leverage a trade. Case closed, right? Well, not really.
I’m bringing this up because it’s an excellent example of what writer Tom Phillips describes as the “bullshit feedback loop”, where “…every new report adds more heft to the idea that something must be true….”
The day the article was published, the content machine fired up and did what it does best, start the feedback loop. The cat was out of the bag all across #NBATwitter, Instagram, blogs, and podcasts of all kinds. OG Anunoby was dissatisfied with his role with the Toronto Raptors, and trade rumours commenced.
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Looking at Google’s search trends, you’ll find a severe uptick in the number of searches for “OG Anunoby Trade” following the publication of the May 31st article.
Google’s search trend for “OG Anunoby Trade” over the last 12 months.
In the following weeks, countless NBA fan bases and their content websites imagined trade scenarios based on the initial report. Trades to the Pacers, Spurs, Jazz, Suns, Nuggets, Sixers, and of course, the primary target, the Portland Trail Blazers, made the rounds daily, citing Fischer’s original article for Bleacher Report. According to the internet, you were interested in making a deal for the Raptors’ forward if you were a basketball team.
All this despite the Raptors organization stating there was no truth to the rumours, including Raptors’ rookie sensation Scottie Barnes who clowned Fischer for the report.
In the end, no trade took place, the NBA draft (a focal point in the Anunoby trade rumours) came and went, and again, no trade. New rumours are speculating on how the trade that didn’t happen didn’t end up happening.
So what’s the big deal here? The off-season is still ongoing, and maybe Anunoby gets traded in the end anyways. This isn’t about a basketball writer trying to crack into the soul-sucking field of being a leading ‘Basketball Insider’.
The fascination here is simply with the way that a nugget of information, credited to ‘sources’ and denied by the actual people involved, can be the jump-off point for almost a month of engagement for the countless content providers vying for your eyeballs to stop scrolling and click.
The bullshit feedback loop in action, if you will. A rumour becomes the basis of countless articles (technically, this one too!), and the more pieces that get published with the story, the more it seems like it actually might be true.
The reaction to the tweets reacting to the story about the rumour. Ughh.
For Jake Fischer, his line of work is an endless need to stay relevant; such is the life of a sports journalist working in the attention economy. His job and livelihood depend on it, and more than that, so do whatever professional ambitions he may have. If OG Anunoby got shipped to Portland last week, guess who gets the avalanche of credit for being first on the scene?
In reality, rumours are compelling, and we all have experience with gossip and whispers in our lives. News organizations, governments, and shit-disturbers have been spreading rumours for centuries. It’s the backbone of online conversations now.
Don’t believe me? MIT conducted a study in 2018 showing that fake news spreads “significantly faster, farther, and deeper” than real news. Fake news and rumours fall into the same category, unverified or simply false information that touches on something more profound in ourselves.
People love to spread rumours, speculate, to imagine countless scenarios. Reality is so narrow, but unverified speculation? Ohh, baby, the endless possibilities aren’t that much more fun?
Spreading rumours, fake news, flat-out bullshit, whatever brand of untruth you subscribe to, is a way of connecting socially with others and sharing information that could be useful. Maybe that’s why conspiracy theories are more popular than ever and why air-tight communities online now exist that peddle whatever form of misinformation feels good to them.
It’s an excuse to log on, chat it up, and make new connections; who cares if there’s any validity to it? If it weren’t for rumours, how would we maintain the steady dopamine drip of things to read, share, and comment on?
Maybe OG Anunoby will be traded at some point this off-season anyways. Maybe not. Or perhaps nobody cares if there’s truth to the report because it’s just something to distract us from a world spiralling down the drain. At the same time, maybe being able to watch the beast in action should help us recognize the problems with how it incentivizes ‘attention at any cost’.
Because the cost right now is our grip on reality.
A 2016 study found that young people struggle to identify misinformation online, and on the horizon are technologies that will be able to fool people to uncomfortable levels. All the while, our brains are hardwired to establish beliefs without considering fact or fiction.
They say, “where there’s smoke, there’s fire”, but beware! In a time when there is a terrible density to the world of “content”, it has become routine for someone to blow that smoke in the hopes you’ll come looking for the fire…
…and that you’ll come running.
