Welcome to tex Stuff, a production of I Heart Radios How Stuff Works. Hey there, and welcome to tech Stuff. I'm your host, Jonathan Strickland. I'm an executive producer with iHeart Radio and I love all things tech, and today we're going to cover an interesting topic. There was a suggestion from Shaye Lee. And you might remember Shay in her alter ego as al Amona, who sabotaged my episode about how matches work, and now she's back. Hi, Shay Hi, I heard Alimona ran off with the quister. Yeah, that's the union made in. They're just gonna burn it all to the ground, burn it all down. So to give some background on what this episode is all about, Shaye reached out to me and asked if I had ever done an episode about a specific piece of internet folklore called aratus, and we're going to get to that. We communicate in stories and your traditional folklore. These are the tales that are passed around. Typically they're not even written down there, their oral traditions. It's told around the campfire. And now the campfires turned into creepy pasta, yes, which we will talk about. So you know that that also developed into things that we call urban legends. Urban leges is just another type of folklore. But it was a subset of folklore that kind of grew into as we started to see the industrial revolution. We saw people move to the cities. You know, it became less of an agrarian world, and a lot lots of the uh, A lot of regions in the around the world became more urban and less agrarian, and a different set of folklore tales started to arise. A lot of them are like tales of warning. Yeah, you say, like don't trust strangers tales. Yes, a lot of morality tales too, Yeah, a lot of them are like, see what happens if you do this thing that breaks our social morays? You will suffer like these people did. Yeah, see what happens when you take candy and or apples from strange women in the woods, right, right, Except now it's like when you're going trick or treating, if you don't check all the candy, you're going to end up with razor blades and poison. Right. Yeah, I've never found a razor blade in any of my candy. Yeah, no one in my twenty seven years of trick or treating, no one ever did until people started worrying about it, and then people would yeah or like or like it would be Oh I discovered this, and it turned out that they had planted their own discovery that kind of thing, kind of like the the murders. Yes. Yes, So one of the things I wanted to to kind of allude to to kind of set the stage for the stuff we're gonna talk about today, which is the more internet based stuff. I'm just going to give an example of one of my favorite urban legends of all time. It's a It's one that's been told a billion different times. It's been written in lots of different anthologies. Shay, you'll appreciate this. When I was in uh elementary school and middle school, the books I checked out the most in my school library, we're all about urban legends, ghosts, and other types of paranormal, supernatural kind of stuff. We have that in common because I did the exact same thing. I stopped believing in it. So that's where our path divulge, No, so diverted, I should say. So. The story I want to tell is the Vanishing Hitchhecker story. Classic story. So the basic version of the story goes, a guy's driving down a road, a dark country road at night. The rain is coming down really hard, it's hard to see, and as he's driving down the road, he sees a young woman walking along the side the road, and so, not wanting her to get totally frozen out in the pouring rain, he pulls over and offers her a ride, and she gets in the back seat of his car, and out of a sense of a concern for her, he gives her his jacket to wrap around herself, and then she gives him an address, and so he starts to drive, and otherwise she doesn't really communicate with him. He gets to the address. When he gets there, he looks in the back seat and the girl's gone, and he never heard the car door open or anything. He doesn't know what happened, and his jacket is gone as well. There's just a like a the seats wet from where she had been because of the pouring rain, but otherwise there's no indication. So he goes to the house where he had the address and knocks on the door to find out what the heck is going on. Woman answers the door. Typically it's a woman in this in this legend, he explains what has happened. The woman goes pale and says, no one by that description lives here. But there was a young woman whose family lived here before us, but she died years ago and she's buried at such and such cemetery. So he goes to the cemetery, and when he comes up on the grave of the young woman, there's his jacket resting on her gravestone vanishing. Hi. Oh, and it's considerate to leave his jacket behind. Yeah, Otherwise she's up with teen angel and looking at rings and jackets that are just an accumulation of wealth that they've had over the years. I remember that movie vaguely. Well, I was talking about the song, but there's a whole genre of music that's dedicated to teenagers dying. So that's an example of an urban legend. It's one that's been told. Like, there's lots of variations. Well, the Internet has its own versions of this, and we're also going to talk about in this episode how the Internet reinforces the communication of these stories and reinforces people's belief in it, largely through the behavior of those who are sharing the stories and also the way the platform themselves work. So you mentioned creepy pasta. Let's explain what creepy pasta is, and I guess first we have to explain what copy pasta is, because creepy pasta is a subset of copy pasta. Before I learned it from you, I actually didn't know that creepy pasta was a subset of copy pasta. I just thought it was its own thing, just the name of a forum, because no one ever talks about copy pasta anymore. But the it's it's a sort of a portmanteau of copy paste, right, and it's the fact that a lot of people to share stories. What they would do is they would find something on the Internet that was interesting, maybe in a message board or whatever, copy it and then paste into some other message board or whatever, and that's yeah. Usually there was no attribution, like I often expelled for that if I tried that. Well, they weren't necessarily they weren't necessarily trying to pass it off as their own work, but rather like I saw this crazy story or this funny joke or whatever it might be. But sometimes when you're doing that copy and basing, well one you might lose the attribution, so you don't know who originated the thing and to sometimes you lose the context, like is this a joke? Is it a piece of fiction? Is it supposed to be an account of something that actually happened. Creepy pasta is a subset where it's specifically about spooky, creepy paranormal typically kind of stuff, but not necessarily paranormal, but often paranormal, or like the unnamed serial killers of Yeah, like the hook that's hanging on the card door, that kind of just the killer. Do you know who Jeff Jeff the Killer. I do not know who Jeff the Killer is. Jeff the Killer is weird because it's in his name. Yeah, you would think, well, Jeff the Killer is a Baker obviously, listen, sorry, listen, my dad was Jeff the Killer Jeff Baker. And um, kind of a boogeyman type story, very like how he comes into your room if you don't share this, or if you share it a number of times or YadA yadya, and um that for me, the story isn't what's important. I'm sure you've seen pictures of him when you're just scrolling through Facebook. Have you seen like the picture it's like a big white creepy face that it's been so edited that there's like no nose and just a big creepy smile and huge eyes, and it usually has like a caption that says, go to sleep under it, or I probably have. Yeah, I've seen a lot on the internet. I don't remember most of it. But um, so, Jeff the Killer. There's many incarnations of Jeff the Killer. There's you know, the creepy guy that comes into your bedroom and kills you and all that. Oh yeah, you know, he's so inconvenient and inconsiderate, but um they're because of creepy Pasta and just all the threads abut Jeff the Killer. There were Jeff the Killer fan girls that would draw a little like a little romantic, you know, heart images of him as as Yeah, as if that's like they're they're brad Pitt that this is this is messed up. So we wanted to talk a little bit about a couple of examples of creepypasta. This is just the beginning of this episode. Two each each section we're going to talk about a different kind of subset of Internet folklore. But creepy Pasta is one that is pretty easy to reference, and uh, one example of it although it didn't necessarily start as creepy pasta itself, because creepy pasta tends to be in the form of some sort of story. Um. A lot of early types of creepypasta fell into one of two categories. It was a story about something that supposedly happened to someone, and it could it could be presented as fiction. You didn't have to present it as if it were real, but it's it's given in that sort of tale, or it was you know, lost episodes of certain types of shows or movies or things that that uh no longer are shown, but they do exist and there's something creepy about what happened, Like it's that one really dark episode of Gilligan's Island. There are versions of of it. Now that that particular style of creepy pasta fell out of favor fairly quickly, Like it was kind of like a creepy version of fan fiction. But one of the most prominent examples is slender Man, which didn't start off, as I said, as creepy pasta. It started off as kind of an exercise. Uh. There was the Something Awful forums forum board on the Internet, so people would get together and have conversations about different topics, and this was particularly in a thread that was titled create Paranormal Images. So it's just people trying to use photoshop to create images that were unsettling or had some sort of alien or paranormal aspect to them, Like the idea like make something that if you were to look at people would go like, ooh, that's what is that? That's creepy. Yeah. So this guy named Eric Knudson created a a picture of an elongated, like an unnaturally tall, unnaturally thin figure with an odd like obscured face, and it became known as the slender Man. He also included a little bit of flavor text to kind of give some very shifty background on this character and attaching him to the fictional fire. And then the Internet took that boy Haldy. Yeah. So there were all these different people who contributed to flushing out the mythology behind slender Man. So the legend of Slenderman grew online, right, and it's on all these different communities and people within that thread had already predicted that some of the images that were being made were likely going to end up on websites about the paranormal, but they would be submitted as if they were genuine examples of evidence, as opposed to somebody specifically crafted this and in fact that did happen, including with slender Man. And so that's where we started seeing more discussions about it, including people who are sure that they had heard of this character before and in fact, that was one of the points you wanted to make, right. Yeah, I worked with a girl a couple of years ago, about five years ago. She swore up and down that she and a bunch of internet friends contributed to, uh, the creation of slenderman um. Not I don't. She didn't mention anything about the photoshop. But the way, if I can remember it correctly, the way she presented it to me was that she and a couple of friends were just chatting over the Internet and somebody on the thread or the forum said, hey, let's make a legend and or let's make a let's let's make an urban legend. And they probably already had their you know, base material with the pictures and the other flavor text and stuff. But she swears up and down that she contributed to the creation of slenderman um. Red Letter Media believes that they contributed to the creation of Slenderman. There's a video called very appropriately did red Letter Media in Vince Slenderman Um three guesses about what that video is, and it was mostly done tongue in cheet. Yeah, but they their criteria is that they made a short film that had a character that was bald and war suit. Yeah, and and he was ominous, so that makes him Slenderman. But by that, by that criteria than like the Gentleman and from Buffy are Slenderman from the episode Hush and the silence from Yeah, he's Slenderman, and you know, ominous bald guys your Slenderman? Dude, are you? Are you Slenderman? I'm only I'm only ominous when I'm walking to work. When I'm walking away from work, I'm whistling and I'm jaunty. Yeah. No, that's a good point. And like when we were sort of brainstorming this episode, one thing she said that really stuck with me is like everybody made slender Man, Like every Yeah, it was like one of those stories where you're just like the Internet's baby. We all made him. But but his actual creation date is something that we can trace back to that photoshop thread, which we even know when that was originally posted, which was June eight, two thousand nine. It is so rare when you can actually trace a legend back to its point of origin. Now, granted, it grew much larger than that thread, and in fact it even factors into a real world crime. And um, this is what I'm sure anyone who's followed the story of Slenderman knows about. There were a group of young girls in Wisconsin and two They were all friends, and two of the friends lured the third one out to a remote location and then stabbed her. Uh. She fortunately was survived the the attack and made a full recovery. Uh. And the two attackers were committed to mental health institutions for at least you know a while you said that one of them is is currently coming up for parole soon. I I didn't actually read the article on it. While I was scrolling through the social media interwebs one day, I saw an article. I didn't read the article, but I saw the headline said, Um, one of them was up for parole, and apparently the family of the victim is not very happy about that. Understandably, so understandable. It is certainly one of those stories where you feel awful for everybody. You feel terrible for people who have lost enough connection with reality to not be able to tell the difference between a fantasy and what is actually real. But then when you're a kid, that's that's a tough distinction to make. Honestly, these days, as an adult, it could be a pretty tough distinction to make. There's a lot of misinformation out there, and the whole thing with internet folklore is that the problem with it is that so much of it seems real. It's presented as it's completely sincere and real. Yeah, I mean, I would like to think that I don't believe in a tall child snatching bald guy, but I mean at late at night, you see something like this and your imagination starts to fill in gaps and then you know, you start to you start to believe things that are not necessarily true might be true. Yeah, we wanted to chat a little bit about also a couple of other examples of creepy pasta really quickly. And this next one was one that surprised me because you also mentioned candle Cove, which I had not heard of before you mentioned it. I hadn't heard of anything about candle Cove until maybe a year and a half ago. Um, I was just I was at my mom's house one day visiting and she and my stepdad were really into the show and it was candle and it's the show I think it was on SI Fi. There was there. It's their Channel zero series. Yeah, that's what tripped me up. But yeah, it was a show called Candle Cove and they were really into it, and she was explaining to me, you know, the the premise, the pres sounded familiar, so I don't know if I had, you know, encountered the encounter the original, but I looked it up because honestly, the reason I was looking it up is that I recognized one of the actors from Parks and rec and I wanted to figure out what his name was. And as I was looking it up, all the information about how Candle Cove started off as I don't think it was on Creepy Pasta, but it was. It was definitely a Creepy Pasta style story. Yes it was. It was written by a guy named Chris Straub. And what's funny is I've talked to Chris Straub personally years ago. So Chris Straub is also a web comic list and I wrote for how Stuff Works dot com. I wrote the article how web Comics Work, and he was one of my sources, and I did a full interview with him, chatted with him for about probably an hour while I was researching this work. And uh, it's so interesting because again I had no idea until we started researching this episode that he had contributed this piece of internet lore. So the original work is presented as a series of posts, again on a message board, so it seemingly a lot of contributors. Yes, but but it's it's the work of fiction of one person, but presented in the way as if it's a thread, a conversational thread between multiple people who all remember this children's show that no one else seems to realize existed. And it starts off pretty innocently, like, Hey, does anyone else here happen to remember this show? I remember watching it as a kid, but I don't. I can't find anything about it, and so I'm wondering, like I just imagine it, and other people say, oh no, I remember that show too, and again this is all part of the fiction. Yeah. I think like the big twist is not only as the show super creepy, as people remember more and more about it, it starts to appear more and more sinister. But one of the details released is that, uh, the person who star the thread chatted with his mother about what had happened, and his mother said, oh, you would always say that you went to want to watch a show called candle Cove, but you just changed the channel to static and sat there and stared at it for thirty minutes. Yeah. So again, very very kind of creepy premise. But that has taken a life of its own, where not only is it a television series on sci fi where they take elements of that and they wrap other narrative around it, um, but on top of that, like I even debate on using on including this because I thought, well, clearly this is the work of fiction. People know it's work of fiction. No, there are YouTube interviews are in YouTube videos I should say titled is was Candle Cove a real TV show? And I thought, well, if you have to make a video about it, then there are people wondering about it. Yeah, because there's there's videos of like original Candle Cove episodes which I'm pretty sure are just lifted from the show or base or there might be some like fan made things because there were fan fictions written about candle Cove. Yeah, now a lot of these actually would get a lot of fan fiction added to it. And Uh, the other thing that this reminds me of is something called the Mandola effect. Um. Actually that's technically the Mandela effect, but I've heard it pronounced the wrong way. But it's named after Nelson Mandela. So have you heard of this effect. I've heard of the effect. I don't actually know why. It's called the Mandela effect. So Nelson Mandela was imprisoned for many, many years, and the Mandela effect refers to this belief that people had that they had heard newscasters in the nineteen eighties announced that Nelson Mandela had passed away while in prison, but that never happened. But people swear they remember seeing those newscasts, but it never happened. There are other examples of this. Uh. The two that people tend to site pretty frequently are the Bernstein Bears, where it's it's spelled stain at the end. That's the correct spelling, but everyone thinks it's steen s T E I n instead of s T A I n um, and they swear like no I have a book and it's spelled the other way. It's the barn steam Bears, the barn Stain Bears, and the other one is Uh. Everyone's convinced that the comedian Sindbad was in a movie in which he played a genie named Shazam. Apparently he was in like a weird promo where he was a genie, but it wasn't there. There was no movie because there was no Yeah, but those are all like Internet legends that ended up sort of get growing, and this man Mandela effect or Mandela effect had this added benefit of people hearing something and then convincing themselves that they too had experienced it, which is kind of interesting. Now we actually have tons more we could talk about, like their other LM monts, not just creepy pasta. There's stuff like inspirational stories that are referred to as glurge, where I've never heard refer to it as that it's you had to be on snopes dot com back in the day on those message boards, but glurge refers to stories that are meant to tap into those sort of sappy emotions that we have. Uh. They also tend to be kind of dark under the surface, but it's it's the inspirational story counterpart to creepy pasta, except it's often passed as it really happened, and it turns out it's never anything verifiable. But rather than go on all arounte about that, we're gonna take a quick break and when we come back, we're gonna talk about some conspiracy theories. Now, we started off this episode talking about works of fiction that aren't necessarily intended to be taken seriously, but sometimes take a life of their own outside of their point of origin, and then they are taken seriously. There are other times where there's just a joke or a hoax that people end up taking as a sincere message. And the first one I wanted to mention is is one of the earliest examples of an Internet hoax. It actually dates to December, when very few people even knew what the Internet was, and it all involves the company Microsoft supposedly acquiring the Catholic Church. Huh, you're a Catholic, so so do you own shares in Microsoft? Is that how it works? I mean I have a Mac, so I don't. I don't know that's true. It's right in front of it. Yeah, I if if my mom's secretly owned shares and Microsoft, then you know she's got some splain in too, do Yeah. So had you heard of this before? I actually never have maybe, And I went to Catholic school for so many years in my life, I'm surprised I never heard this four. How old were you in ninety four? I was two, okay, maybe that's why you didn't hear about it, okay, whereas I was older than that. So this was a joke, and it was clearly a joke. It was a press release, supposed press release, but it was, you know, a joke in the form of a press release supposedly from the Associated Press, which is you know, it's a legitimate organization. Uh. It even had a byline by Hank Vorhez was supposedly the name of the person who who wrote up this press release in your relation to Jason, not Vorhees. Uh so, uh yeah. And I even wrote, just imagine what Clippy would be like. So you're trying to transubstantiate, would you like some help? Um? So? Yeah. The the hoax, the press release hoax even included a host in quote from Bill Gates, who was referring to religion as a growth market. Obviously that was part of the joke. And I said that Microsoft would get exclusive electronic publication rights to the Bible, so they would be able to only one version of it, not the King James, and that would be the yeah, be it would be whatever is the most Catholic version. Yeah, the longer version, the Catholic version of anything. Is the longer version ever been to a Catholic wedding. Yes, I had still going on. I know I had to sneak out. That was seven years ago. But yeah, this, like I said, it was pretty clear it was a joke. And yet there are people who either they got mad because they thought that Microsoft had been perpetuating this joke and they said this is in poor taste and Microsoft got flooded with complaints, or there were a few people who thought it was a genuine press release and they were horrified about it, and they were reaching out the Microsoft express their horror and concern. It got so bad that Microsoft actually formally denounced the joke on December six, released its own press release to say, no, we had nothing to do with this announcement. We definitely did not buy the Catholic Church. We know, we don't know who it was that created this, We have no connection to it. We are sorry that you're upset, which was weird that they were apologizing for something that they literally had no control over. I mean, this wouldn't be the only time that Microsoft would get connected to Internet legends and hoaxes. There's there were also ones that said if you forward this email, then Bill Gates is going to give you like dollars, which was never true. Oh those chain letters, I remember those email chain letters quite well. Yeah, thankfully those have kind of died down. But you sometimes will see the equivalent on Facebook where it will be like usually Facebook, it's share this, but don't share it copy and pasted. And by the way, cut that message. Don't share this copy and pasted. That's pretty much a dead giveaway that what what you're being asked to do is to perpetuate a hoax, because the justification usually get is we don't want the people who are most vulnerable to be targeted, so therefore, copy and paste it or Facebook's algorithms will not promote this if you share it. That's not true. The reason they don't want you to share it is because if you share it rather than copy and pasted Yeah, you can trace it back to the point of origin. So sounds but the Microsoft Catholic Church stuff sounds a little Jonathan swift E. Yeah, it was a it was a pretty odd thing to see become, you know, a hoax level. Again, I don't think it was intended as a hoax. Like to me, this sounds like an onion article and someone mistaken believing that a satirical article is a real thing, like a modest proposal type of stuff. Yeah, And when you when you see people taking something that was meant as satire, sincerely, that's not scary. It is scary, although sometimes it's you could also argue some people are just really bad at satire, and sometimes things that people claim our satire just are lies. S satirical, it's just a lie. And uh, you know, perpetuating a lie and then telling people, oh no it's satire. That's not to get out of jail free card. My joke didn't land. Oh don't worry, it was just satire. Yeah, no, it wasn't. It was a bad joke, right right, or or there's no, there was no joke structure there. You were just telling falsehoods. Then you got mad when you got called out on it. So that is a very early example. And then the next one is sort of the genesis for this whole episode, the eratus story E R R A t A S. Although sometimes it's just with one R R A T A S. I'm glad that you've established that we were saying erratas not not not erotic, or I was saying like aratus. Well, it's a rata. Errata is already plural, so it's already it's already got a problem with it. Yeah, because it's it's pluralized, uh in an Anglican way. But arrata would already be the plural and it means like errors. Right. You typically would say, like you would publish a rata to say these are things that we're included in the previous published work which there are wrong. Yeah, might be a typo, might be that there was a misplaced decimal and a figure or something. So the misspelling of erratas is in itself of errata to be in a ratum, right, it wouldn't be. It's errataception. Okay, So this is a weird one. It's a very odd story. It's actually kind of hard to explain because it gets wrapped up in about two or three different kind of weird things. Uh. Supposedly, aratus itself refers to some kind of computer algorithm. Yeah, that's used by HR or used by companies to remove material they don't want on the Internet. Like think of it as it's supposedly an algorithm that can seek and destroy content and remove it from the Internet automatically. Typically described as a way of removing stuff that's infringing on copyright, so like a takedown. So let's say that you, I don't know, you upload the entire film Berry Gordy's the Last Dragon to YouTube, and you just haven't hosted on your own account because it's the greatest movie ever made, and I will brook no discussion upon the matter, and then this ratus computer algorithm would could be could be sent to take that down. There's no need for that. YouTube has a very effective, some would say over effective means of taking down stuff that gets copyright strikes on it, either demonetizing it or taking it down entirely, there's no need for an algorithm. But the other component to this is that supposedly the algorithm could find and remove references to itself. Yeah, like if you what it's when I was researching, it seemed like it was saying that if you, if anybody even typed in erratas into like a search engine, it could somehow not really damage your computer, but it could like track you just by looking it up or something like like Like a lot of stories went were about how someone was supposedly working for a company and came across some mention of eratus box labeled yeah, or like a division that had the name Eratus, and then they would do an internal search on their uh intra net, right the company's intranet, not the Internet necessarily, and that this would suddenly raise an alarm among the big wigs and that person would be dismissed, fired from their job, or they would be discouraged in no uncertain terms to leave all that alone. And so it was just this idea that it was a forbidden search term to the point where people were perpetuating stories that you shouldn't even search for it online because it could come back to haunt you. Don't even think think. Meanwhile, seemingly not connected to this at all, there was a YouTube account created called Chronos for Life that appeared to be mostly dedicated to a very odd video talking about the Jurassic Park film. It was like a fan video of Jurassic Park. And have you watched these videos? I didn't watch the video. I watched clips of the like snippets of the videos themselves. So a lot of the videos have like white text on top of there's there's no that's illegible. Yeah, there's no, there's no like voice over. It's like the narrator is communicating via text, but it's white text over light background. So it makes it. And sometimes it's only up for a short number of frames, and it's and the video itself along with the text is so poor quality no matter how you watch it that it's hard to read, no matter what. Right, So you get you get the sense that the person who made this uh is either doing some very interesting but strange performance art, or maybe they're not. They're not. Well, that's another possibility, because it comes across very disjointed, illogical, difficult to follow, things that would typically be unsettling. Yeah, it was kind of conspiratorial, but you didn't really know what the conspiracy was, right, And then there would be a video that was in that same vein, but not about Jurassic Park rather about how uh this eratus thing was a dark conspiracy and I think that it was even Uh the person was worried about their mother being under surveillance. Yeah, because the mom was the one originally uploading all the Jurassic Park videos because or something. And then yeah, that that her her own mental acuity was deteriorating as a result of this, and yeah, I guess, very very strange. And then uh, people found that if they turned on captions for these videos, because you couldn't really make anything out in the videos, but you turn on captions, you would get these captions that would not appear otherwise. That left clues, and if you followed the clues, you would eventually find your self looking at the band camp page for a band called KFC Murder Chicks. Are we going to get sued? No, but that's what the band was called. I'm yeah, are they going to get sued? But probably not at this point. It sounds to be like that band has been defunct for a long time. So what this eventually appeared to be was a case of a person working on a music project which largely was based around taking snippets of audio from videos and putting it together into really weird uh composition. Yeah. The purpose of the band was to create a type of music called Internet sounds. Yeah deep Internet, Yeah, the deep Internet Sounds, and it was supposed to be some sort of weird, distorted background noise. It made me think of like a perhaps less focused approach to to forrmants as a Negative Land does, and that's a band that does a lot of compositions by taking pieces audio snippets from different sources and putting them together into very interesting uh audio like interesting albums. Actually, in fact, I had UH, one of the founding members of Negative Land on for a couple of episodes and we talked about that work so similar to that, and in fact that the person who had UH created these would later say, yeah, this was just sort of my attempt to kind of make something um, but I didn't really have a fully fleshed out plan on how that was going to work. But on the Internet people were following it and filling in the gaps and making it more than what it was and treating it like, oh, there really is this conspiracy out there. And one of the crazy things about conspiracy theory is that if you come out and tell someone no, that was all manufactured, it's not actually a conspiracy that ends up being parcy. Yeah, it's a cover up, right, Like, so there's no way to disprove a conspiracy to someone who's desperately going to follow that conspiracy theory. They they they are invested in believing in it, and so any counter evidence you give was manufactured to discredit the conspiracy, but it doesn't disprove it. That kind of thing. So this is another one of those cases where again I I had never even heard of this until you asked me about it. I honestly, at the beginning of this week, I was just very sick and going through just the interwebs, and I came across the video about eratas conspiracy, and I was like, that sounds like something he has talked about at some point. I don't know. There are so many episodes that I'm not sure. I mean, it may turn out that there that I have covered this very same story. Yeah, and I wouldn't remember this was all a conspiracy in and of itself. Well, I think it's fascinating and we have a little bit more to talk about as far as misinformation goes, where Like in this case, I would say that the eradas thing kind of falls into the land of the alternate reality game genre. So alternate reality games are where you mix reality and the fictional world within a game, and um, there are a lot of examples. They typically are marketing tools. So for example, AI, the movie AI, the Spielberg Kubrick film AI had an alternate reality game associated with it that a lot of people referred to as The Beast, and it was a story that played out mostly online, but included some stuff where people could interact not just online, but they could get faxes and phone calls and stuff. So it was like the fictional world of the game would reach across the barrier between reality and fiction and interact with you in ways in the real world that typically games don't. So it became kind of a role playing game almost, um. And I think that that's one version that can end up being misconstrued as being reality as opposed to now this is a marketing thing, or it's it's meant to be a game. When we come back, we're gonna talk about examples of misinformation that we're created specifically to perpetuate an agenda, not to create some sort of fiction or a game. We'll do that after we come back from this quick break. All right, we're getting into the home stretch, and this is some of the darkest stuff we have to talk about. So there are communities out on the Internet that so discord and they may do it for multiple reasons. They might just want to you know, it might be like what Christopher Nolan would say, some people just want to watch the world burn. Um. In some cases, it's to push a particular agenda that they really believe in, or to discredit an agenda that they do not like. And um, and all's fair in these communities, and in fact, you have multiple people with different motivators, all working towards the same goal. Some people may earnestly want to bring down something. Some people may just think it's funny to see commotion come out of their work, you know. Some people just want to get a rise out of people. Um. But the communities that we typically see this in the most are places like four chan and eight chan, where we get groups of people who find each other, they have some sort of commonality between them, and they know how to gamify systems. They know how people think, and they know how systems work, and using those two things together, they can perpetuate misinformation and lies and push forward their own agenda. And we've seen that several times over the last few years. In particular, so one entity or one group would be q and on. Really that's originally an entity UH, a person who was posting with the handle q um so q and on being anonymous that has posted numerous things that were very conspiracy oriented directed at particular groups or people, for example Hillary Clinton UM and it ends up being something a narrative that ends up being picked up by other people and then presented as truth that then gets reinforced again and again to the point where you start seeing some of those things that have never shown to have any actual truth to them being presented by UH by media outlets as truth, usually right wing media outlets. You don't tend to see that beyond that group, but it has become a real issue. And one example of that has been known as pizza Gate. And pizza Gate is a pretty a truly terrible story UH and it's it's one that alleges that there was this particular pizza parlor where secretly there was a pedophilia ring running through this this pizza parlor, Like that was like the nexus for this pedophilia ring, uh, and that this establishment also had a connection to the Clintons, And there were a lot of different people posting on a lot of different platforms that we're trying to substantiate these claims that again under investigation, there was no evidence to support any of it, but that wasn't what was important. What was important was that ground swell of people making these allegations and then immediately responding to any criticism by saying, you're trying to cover this up and that is unacceptable. Their children and they're they're welfare that's at stake and how dare you? And I mean, that's a very powerful emotional lever to pull. So it was really effective, at least in certain circles. Yes. And also it's one of those arguments where you are confirming so one's bias that's directed towards a certain group. Right. So that's one of the reasons why we really wanted to talk about this topic. Two is the idea that why do these things get spread so fast and why do they get adopted so quickly? And it's a couple of different things. Uh. One of the big things is just the way human behavior tends to work. So say, if you come up to me and you tell me something that that seems to confirm a bias I already have, I am more inclined to believe you right, because you seem to be telling me something that that reinforces a belief I already possess. So if I believe I have a sweet, sweet style despite all evidence to the contrary, and you come up and you say, Wow, you're really got that outfits really well put together, you really are looking great today, I can sit there and think like, oh, yeah, I knew I have a sweet, sweet style, and sheha is just reinforce that belief. So while any objective viewer might look at me and think this guy doesn't even know how to match his socks, I'm walking down the straight thinking I got sweet sweet style. Yes, But in that case that was that's harmless, right. But if I have, let's say a different belief. Let's say that I believe that um an organization like the Red Cross. Let's say I have a belief that the Red Cross is actually doing something really nefarious. And then you were to come to me and say, I just heard that over in South Carolina the Red Cross has quarantined this entire community, and they won't tell anyone why. And it's like it doesn't even have to make any sense, right, It doesn't have to have It doesn't have to make any sense you have to have you don't have to have any corroborating evidence. If it plays into a belief I already have, I am more inclined to believe you, So that's part of it. If it plays on a fear I have, I'm more inclined to believe you because if I'm already afraid of something and you tell me there's that that fear is is rational or is you know, legitimate because of some other reason, I'm more inclined to believe you. On top of that, we have these Internet communities and uh, in some cases you might have something like a sub credit where you have these people who share some sort of common interest or common trait. They will reinforce their beliefs. It becomes an echo chamber. But you also have platforms like Facebook and Facebook. The way it works is that when a post gets a lot of engagement, when people are leaving comments, when people are sharing it, when people are liking it. You know, when people are applying to one another. Facebook sees that activity, and Facebook makes money when people are spending time on Facebook. So if they see if they being an algorithm, actually it's not even a person. If the Facebook algorithm identifies certain posts as being really productive from an engagement standpoint, those posts are valuable because it means when people see this, they spend more time on the platform. When they spend more time on the platform, we make more money. So let's promote the posts that are getting this kind of crazy engagement. And so that's why you see posts that are not necessarily sincere or earnest, or accurate or truthful get promoted on sites like Facebook. In fact, that's one of the big reasons why the United States government has called Facebook to task on multiple occasions for perpetuating, you know, quote unquote fake news, which I term I hate because it's often used to discredit actual news while not being applied to what is truly fake news. But that's neither here nor there. So it's a tricky situation because as a as a human being, it's asking what what I'm asking you to do is to engage your critical thinking skills even when you're encountering something that seems to be confirming your beliefs, like you have to. You have to apply critical thinking even in those cases, especially in those cases, because that's when your most vulnerable to accepting a lie as the truth, When it is telling you something that you want to hear, or it's reaffirming something you were afraid of. That's when you have to apply those critical thinking skills the most. Because the people who are perpetuating this stuff, they already they're aware, at least on a certain level of human psychology and how these things work and how messages can be delivered in a way that will get the broadest acceptance. So you have to keep that in mind, like they're gamifying the system, and the system happens to be the way people think and the way these communities operate. To quote my favorite musical ever created um ref Madness the Musical. Okay, I just think it was gonna be repo the Genetic Opera, But go ahead, I mean, I guess we could find a connection there as well. But refermat the very last line and refor Madness the Musical is when danger's near, exploit their fear. The end will justify the means. Yeah, so this is not this is not a new idea. I mean, propaganda is largely based on this same principle. In fact, you know, you could say that a lot of the people who are creating this misinformation, they're just following in the same footsteps as ad executives and uh and and political operatives have for for decades or longer. Um fax has always been part of advertisement pretty much. Oh absolutely, no, I mean you look back at like someone. The series mad Men was based off of actual advertising executives who really did find incredibly creative ways to convince people to buy stuff that they didn't want or need. And the same thing is true now about much more critical stuff like who are leaders are or what policies we should adopt, or what groups we should you know, pay attention to. So it's a it's a you know, while we started off kind of talking about folklore, the important thing is that we need to be able to separate fiction from truth. We can still enjoy fiction. I think stuff like creepy pasta has a definitely has a place. It just has a place as accepting it as hey, let's get around the fire and tell ghost stories. Not come here. You need to hear this because it might save your life. Yeah, right, that's the difference. We have to be able to differentiate those two things. If we don't, we're more likely than not to act on incorrect information. So, Jeff, the killer is not really in your bedroom. I sure hope not. I don't have to clean. I would feel so awkward. I'd be like, I'm so sorry for the mess. You've been hanging around me too much, apologizing to just kill me now because I feel so embarrassed. They'd be like, listen, you've maybe he would help you clean it before. I'd say, you made your bed, but you clearly haven't. Yeah, well, I mean he's just gonna dirty it up anyway. Yeah, that's true. Just stabby step stab, which ironically was the name of the operation that the two girls who carried out the slip. Yeah, they called it stabby step stab. That is that's actually nothing. Yeah. I thought I was just pulling that out of thin air, but then I remember, nope, that's what they called that. So that was a callback, not on purpose. That was just my brain sabotaging me. Not not creative. I mean, I know that's the lack of creativity is not the worst part of the story, but problematic part of it. Well, Shaye, thank you for your suggestion, Thank you for letting me come on the show and annoy you. You didn't didn't annoy me at all. It was very helpful, and I am glad to have someone to talk with so that it you know, we can have that sort of conversation and you can. You know, you introduced me to stuff I had not heard about, and I find a lot of it fascinating. You introduced me to something I didn't know about that was written by a guy I do know, which was weird. Yeah, yeah, that was odd. Now I watched the show like in its entirety. Now, yeah, now, he wrote the original Creepypasta. I don't think he was connected to the show, except maybe he probably got a credit. Yeah, I probably got like a writer's credit or maybe even like a producer's credit. I I honestly don't know. And honestly, it's not like we're friends or anything. I literally interviewed him for an article. So what he's saying is that he wants to be your friends. I mean, that's true. It's true. It's true, but it's not not relevant. Okay, So if you guys have suggestions for future episodes of tech Stuff, or maybe there's someone you want me to have on as a guest, or maybe you think, why don't you have that shape person on again? You need to let me know. You can reach out to me on Facebook or Twitter. The handle for both of those is text stuff H s W and I'll talk to you again really soon. Text Stuff is a production of I Heart Radio's How Stuff Works. For more podcasts from my heart Radio, visit the i heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.