What the Internet Does to Bad Ideas
Our Body Cultural is built upon our stories of ourselves, but that process is crumbling
This is a story: A report came out in the German newspaper Bild in 2016 that seemed to validate the feelings of those who’d claimed that taking in refugees brought rape and crime to the country. The paper reported that a “sex mob” of fifty or more “Arab” men ran rampant in Frankfurt on New Year’s Eve, sexually assaulting dozens of women and causing havoc.
The story is entirely false. But it went viral. As Newsweek’s Rossalyn Warren wrote, the article, which went global when it was aggregated by the far-right American news site Breitbart, did so because it “played on some of Germany’s worst fears.” A police investigation soon found social media posts indicating that the original source of the story — a woman quoted by Bild only by her first name, Irina — wasn’t even in Frankfurt on the night in question.
Like a tiger’s stripes, stories have evolved to use the appearance of facts as a camouflage — and it has never been more difficult to tell one from the other.
The Frankfurt rape mob story and others like it, such as this hoax about refugees allegedly setting…
