By: Frank Thompson

First off, I’d like to apologize for putting up a story that turned out to be completely false and framing it as if it were true. Unfortunately, like everyone, I am bound to be mislead at times. But then I began surfing the web to see if there were other sites reporting the Callista Gingrich calling the cops on a breastfeeding mother story, and surprisingly there are a lot of “apology” postings about how they got their source from the Weekly World News and believed it.

While the story on Callista Gingrich calling the cops on a woman for breastfeeding is fake, the fact that it was still covered and widely believed is true. Not just by news sources or people with blogs, but a wide range of people. In essence, the story went viral.

But I don’t think we should just sweep that fact under the rug. Unlike other cases of internet sources being fabricated and believed, this, I believe, was different. First off, the story came from Weekly World News, a news source that’s most famous for their Bat Boy story, which was then turned into a great musical, sightings of Elvis Presley, the Loch Ness monster, and other stranger-than-fiction stories that are at best regarded as satirical tabloids and at worst junk news.

So why, despite a very open history about fabricating stories, did people surfing the web believe the hype, including myself? I think glossing over the Callista Gingrich story with just saying, ‘That’s how the internet works,’ isn’t entirely accurate in this case. Sure, that’s part of it, but I believe that an underlying reason as to why so many people believed the story and then published it on their websites was because people willed it into truth.

It’s an internet truth. Similar to a historical truth, an internet truth can be completely fabricated on a loose interpretation of facts. In this case, the story revolved around the fact that Newt Gingrich had a wife named Callista and many value voters believe that Gingrich lacks in family morals — so who wouldn’t believe that his wife would be as well?

But too often we merely brush aside the cultural impact of our treatment of internet facts that invariably we’ll reach a point where there will be a polarization of people in the world: those that troll the internet to denounce everything as false, and those that wholeheartedly believe anything they read on the internet. Rather than saying ‘That’s how the internet works,’ we should be having a discussion about what is occurring on the internet on a cultural level and how we can safeguard against falling for anything.

PS – Weekly World News did in fact intend for the original story to be taken as satirical.