Faking History on the Internet: Romans Invade Ireland October 3, 2014
Author: Beach Combing | in : Actualite, Ancient , trackback
***Thanks to Louis for help with this story***
The following is a parable about how history is written on the internet. Let’s imagine you have a web page and you want people to visit it. How could you get the history scoop of 2014? Well you could go and bribe some doctorate students, ask for an interview with a wanw professor, research an area to death and pontificate… What you don’t have time? Then why not just make it all up?! This was the brilliant idea of http://worldnewsdailyreport.com, a site that has a (self declared) reputation for inventing rather than writing news. They might have concocted the spires of Atlantis or a spitfire on the moon. Instead, the staff writer in question, just recently wrote a surprisingly well informed piece on a Roman invasion of Ireland: well informed in terms of the frame that is…
Now the Romans never officially reached Ireland, but we do have some hints in both archaeology and history that a Roman legion may have turned up in Leinster: certainly plenty of Irish warriors turned up in Britain… Imagine then that an Irish archaeologist dug a trench near Dublin in which the skeletons of a dozen Roman legionaries were discovered. That would be dramatic and credible and isn’t it just about possible that news sources would send out the story without thinking, whereas they might actually check facts about the lunar spitfire or the long lost spires of Atlantis?
In any case, you dress up the story as best you can. Let’s invent an Irish professor. I know let’s call him ‘O’ something: got it O’ Neal, Timothy O’Neal. Let’s say he is an archaeologist associated with the National Museum of Ireland: it is actually much easier to track down professors at universities than one affiliated with non-academic institutions. The author, even placed the killing trench carefully, claiming it was near Drumanagh fort, a location associated with an unusually high number of Roman finds. Finally, they got together all sorts of convincing sounding primary sources from Tacitus, to Juvenal, to some diarrhoea from out of the bowels of middle Irish legend. They did a good job, in fact, apart from mispelling the word ‘lead’ in the first sentence and ‘O’neal’, and claiming that there were 471 dead legionaries (greedy!); there was also some nonsense about legionaries being identified by their scarves (wth!).
And how did our friends at WNDR do with this carefully planted fake in terms of page visits? Well, just to give you an idea… 4580 people shared the story on Facebook (Beach is happy when he gets to 50), 102 on twitter and four on pinterest. More interesting are the professional sites that picked the story up: these included chauvetdreams, the around-Ireland-blogspot, beforeitsnews, and the ecumenical and usually entertaining ancientorigins (shame on you, boys!).* So a moderate success, though not really enough to justify the effort. If only there had been a lazy comment writer in Boston… Having said that perhaps they should have waited for St. Pat’s day.
This leads to the last question: why did they do it? Well, WNDR has form: other stories on the site include archaeologists in Turkey excavating the Trojan Horse and El Dorado discovered in Columbia, giant human remains near Stonehenge and Putin’s male lover. Now the writers would point out that there is a disclaimer that all their stories are fake: ‘All news articles contained within worldnewsdailyreport.com are fiction, and presumably [?!] fake news.’ But if this is satire this has to be the most bizarre form yet perpetrated. It is entirely credible and entirely unfunny, which can only mean that it is not satire: satire = ‘Sarah Palin tells Obama that he should invade Ebola’ etc. And lest you think you’ve heard the last of the 471 legionaries just wait. In 20 years there’ll be a self published book on Amazon called Ireland: A Roman Province, based on the finds of Timothy O’Neal and his discoveries from the 2010s, which were hushed up by the establishment (the Vatican, the Brits, or Sinn Fein: delete as appropriate). Of course, by, then, the writing staff of WNDR will have been hunted down and killed by Putin’s agents, who really doesn’t want his gay sex life getting out, and when it happens Beach will write their obituary…
Other internet history fakes: drbeachcombing AT yahoo DOT com
*They took it down pdq too…
31 Oct 2014: Leif an old friend of this blog writes ‘Google tells us little about the ‘World news daily report’, but the resemblance to the ‘Weekly world news’ seems too close to be sheer coincidence. Supermarket tabloids are no longer profitable, so today they exist on the web. The general term for this kind of thing is ‘exploitation’. As kids, we would watch exploitation films hoping for a few thrills, but usually we would just get ripped off. My favorite exploitation tabloid, the ‘Weekly world news’, invented ‘Elvis sightings’– true tales of people who met Elvis after his death in 1977. It also reported on the antics of an alien and a creature known as the Bat Boy. WWN included confessionals like ‘I ate my baby’, and the old standard ‘Baby eaten by wild hog’. (In general, babies fared poorly in these publications.) The ‘Weekly world news’ featured at least one pseudo-archeology report per issue– covering Biblical themes like Noah’s ark or Vikings in Patagonia. Recently ‘World news daily report’ has gained considerable attention from two articles: ‘Viking artefacts discovered near Great Lakes’ and ‘Viking ship discovered near Mississippi River’. The ‘Romans invade Ireland’ article is an obvious follow up. Why does the WNDR come up with stuff like this? Advertising revenue. These articles have generated considerable web traffic.’ I am sure Leif is correct but I was struck by a relative lack of advertising on the sight!’ Thanks Leif
