The killer clowns are back. They had not been seen for a long time: their last appearance dates from thirty years ago. At that time, the flame of It – Stephen King’s haunting novel published in 1986 – fanned the embers left by images of the terrible serial killer John Wayne Gacy dressed as a clown, who raped and killed more than thirty young people between 1972 and 1978. The result, studied by the North American popularizer Loren Coleman, was a few years of sightings of this type of person in various parts of the United States.
The cycle repeats itself because the rumor has been reborn in small North American towns and, probably, encouraged by the filming of a new film version of It . But this time it reached, and in a short time, world dimensions. Just two months later, clowns began to spread panic in countries as distant as Mexico, Spain and Australia. Witnesses claimed to see evil characters in the vicinity of schools and playgrounds who encouraged children to approach them to go together to a sinister place. On Halloween, this urban legend reached its climax. And with the same speed that it spread, it was diluted: since then, they have hardly been spoken of.
Rumors fly
How do you explain the difference in the speed of diffusion and disappearance of a hoax that is repeated every so often? The Internet has the answer. As Patricia Wallace, a psychologist at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, reminds us, the Web amplifies the infection . First, we must take into account the ease of recording and the subsequent virality of videos today: within a few hours, a scene shot in Wisconsin has already been viewed hundreds of thousands of times around the world. That same speed has a side effect: the sources are almost never checked on the internet . The tweeters or bloggers who spread the rumor want to be the first to talk about it. And they do not mind using phrases such as “the police have arrested several groups of clowns …” without confirming if they are true.
Another factor that explains the success of this urban legend is the notoriety provided by the networks. The possibility of dressing up as a clown, taking a selfie – or waiting for someone scared to take a picture of us – and uploading the result to Twitter, Facebook or Instagram is very tempting. The hunter of urban legends Benjamin Radford, author of the book Bad Clowns , explains that so many people have played with the coulrophobia – irrational fear of clowns and cuddles – of others, even being aware that they could be attacked, as in fact happened in Berlin at the height of the wave of panic. The opportunity to acquire short-lived celebrity has increased the number of volunteers to intimidate others across the planet.
A less critical generation
Another explanation for the rapid rise and fall of rumors in modern times has been put into play by Frank T. McAndrew, a social psychologist and professor at Knox College in Illinois. It is about the emotional impact of the videos, images, text and voice present in messages on the Internet. This mix of formats makes us less critical . Faced with a pseudo-information such as that of murderous clowns, we do not ask ourselves, for example, why they are seen so many times stalking their victims, but never using violence against them. Fear reaches the limbic system of the brain without giving the cortex an opportunity to assess whether there are real reasons for being scared.
All these variables come together and the end result is that rumors are stronger than real news , as described by the post-truth neologism, word of the year 2016 for the Oxford Dictionary. That is precisely what a study by the University of Warwick, in England, concluded after comparing the impact of tweets on global events – the jihadist attack on the French weekly Charlie Hebdo or the Germanwings plane disaster – with others that spread lies. . The result was that the former had a half-life of two hours, while the gossip continued to exist for an additional fourteen hours.
Gossip distinguishes us from robots
That expansive power isn’t new. Manufacturing trolleys and propagating them is one of the activities to which human beings have spent the most time throughout history. Santiago Ramón y Cajal (1852-1934) affirmed: “Man is a social being whose intelligence requires, to get excited, the rumor of the beehive”. In his book The Shadows of the Mind (1992), the British physicist Roger Penrose suggested that the taste for uncertain stories is a good example of the non-computable aspects of the mind; that is, the factors that distinguish us from machines that use artificial intelligence. And perhaps that is why the digital revolution has not lessened the strength of urban legends, but quite the opposite: despite the current possibilities to deny them, human beings prefer to use technological tools to multiply them.
Memetics can also help us understand it. According to the scholars of this branch of sociology, such as the evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins and the psychologist Susan Blackmore, the propensity for social noise could be explained by the tendency of information to replicate, just like genes. The most widespread stories or memes – not to be confused with photos retouched for humorous purposes that invade social networks – are those that triumph in the fight for cultural survival. And to impose themselves, they use an effective mechanism: they stimulate our mind more than the proven facts. That’s because we believe we reveal secrets whose protagonists wish to keep hidden but which we have learned thanks to our cunning .
The ‘smartass’ spread more hoaxes
Since the eighties, the Polybius video game has been the subject of a persistent rumor. According to legend, the subliminal messages that penetrated the mind of the addicted gamer – kill yourself, don’t think, give up … – produced psychotic outbreaks, nightmares and, on some occasions, even pushed him to suicide. Installed in gambling dens in the American city of Portland, it had been quickly removed by the same men in black who brought it in. But a number of experts – hackers, programmers, video game designers … – claim to have proof of its existence thanks to their expertise with computers. Again, the ego of believing oneself smarter than the vulgar alienated is behind the circulation of these stories .
One way to succeed is to be a pioneer in posting alleged facts online that are consistent with the ideology of those who follow us. If a news item illustrates the vision of reality of our reference group, we share it without waiting to contrast the facts . An example: after the attacks that Paris suffered on November 13, 2015, the young Canadian journalist Veerender Jubbal was identified as one of the attackers. His photograph displaying the Koran and wearing a vest appeared on the front page of a Spanish newspaper and was broadcast by one of the most important television networks.
Pure manipulation
The plausibility of the image, which fitted in with the view that the public of these media have of an Islamic terrorist, made it the icon of the massacre despite the fact that the protagonist was Sikh – a non-Muslim religion – and that the incriminating objects they had been introduced by crude manipulation. The vest did not exist in the original photo and the Quran was actually… an iPad. In fact, someone should have been suspicious, because those who produced the montage added an object very unusual for jihadism: a dildo.
This ties in with another reason to spread hoaxes: political manipulation . The lies that have run freely in the last elections in the United States, for example, respond to such motivation. Thousands of messages announced on social networks the murder of the FBI agent who leaked the emails of the Democratic leader; the unconditional support of Pope Francis for Donald Trump; or that, according to WikiLeaks revelations, Hillary Clinton had sold weapons to the Islamic State.
All this string of tricks spread, again, with more force than the authentic information. News that contained false data – 19.1% of those published in pro-Democratic media and 37.7% of those in favor of Republicans, according to the BuzzFeed website – had a much higher following. After Trump’s unexpected triumph, Google and Facebook declared their intention to turn off the advertising tap to the sites that put them into circulation. In addition, the social network of Mark Zuckerberg has begun to implement filters so that they are not shared by its users.
From El Dorado to the wise men of Zion
However, the propaganda use of gossip is by no means new. As folklorist Jan Harold Brunvand, professor emeritus at the University of Utah, reminds us, we like stories that summarize our worldview in anecdote . For this reason, throughout history they have been used ideologically. The supposed existence in the Middle Ages of the preste Juan – descendant of the wise men who ruled in the East a fabulous kingdom full of riches – spurred the crusaders to rescue the holy places from the infidel dominion. For its part, the myth of El Dorado encouraged the Spanish conquerors of the 16th century to enter a territory full of dangers. And the implausible protocols of the sages of Zion demonized the Jews in Nazi Germany. In the same way, internet rumors have the clear objective of influencing or confirming our opinions.
Our deepest fears
The latter reminds us of the emotion that manipulation attempts are trying to mobilize: our deepest fears. In reality, all the hoaxes deal with issues that have frightened us since the beginning of the human being: death, sex, economic security … The cryogenization of Walt Disney, the explosion of Ana Obregón’s artificial breasts in mid-flight, the hand black coming from the toilet or the death of Paul McCartney reflect fears of the modern world, and are embellished into stories that continue their impact over the years. Today, as has always been the case, the reputation of a public figure depends more on hearsay than on truth.
If a person is terrified, they stop thinking rationally. And that prevents you from reacting and remembering that rumors are like checks: you have to check if they have substance before taking them for good. And that the internet provides us with places to check the veracity of the facts. The Snopes page, for example, is dedicated to debunking long-established myths . Browsing through it, we can find rigorous articles that expose such recurring statements as that we only use 10% of our brain, that ostriches hide their heads underground or that Albert Einstein failed Mathematics in school. Indiana University, in the United States, is also working on Hoaxy – from the English word hoax , ‘deception’ – a computer system that investigates how rumors spread and then makes an index of the places responsible for launching them.
No conversation topics
But these measures are unlikely to be too successful. As the case of murderous clowns, satanic video games and non-existent attacks shows, urban legends continue to seduce us . As the English psychologist and researcher Richard Wiseman stated in his book Rarology, the fondness of transmitting hoaxes or gossip is not something marginal, but rather says a lot about our deep nature. Rumors shape our ideology and our way of feeling, they make us motivated towards certain achievements and fear what we judge dangerous. Unproven facts permeate all of our conversations – what would we talk about if we only brought up anecdotes that we could verify? – and both the history books and people’s reputations are made up of finely spun hoaxes. The Internet, like any artifact created by man, is only serving to enhance the effect of this psychological phenomenon . Because the need to create and transmit hoaxes is not on the screen of the mobile, the tablet or the computer, but within the human being.
