Confusion Is the Point
As long as we continue to rely on social platforms for clarity, we’ll never find it
By now, you know a version of the story. In one telling, a large group of MAGA-hat wearing teenage boys from a Kentucky Catholic school are aggressors; in another, they’re not. As Julie Irwin Zimmerman wrote at the Atlantic, what you see in the video of the boys from Covington Catholic surrounding Nathan Phillip this past weekend in Washington, D.C., probably depends on a number of things that are already decided. “The story is a Rorschach test — tell me how you reacted, and I can probably tell where you live, who you voted for in 2016, and your general take on a list of other issues,” Zimmerman wrote.
But something beyond the biases we carry is at work here. Namely, how we became aware of the incident: on social media. A Rorschach test assumes the paper it’s printed on has no effect on the image we’re trying to interpret. But social media — Twitter, Facebook, Instagram — is not a blank sheet of paper. It has its own agenda. It wants to keep us guessing.
On Monday, CNN reported Twitter suspended one of the accounts that helped the original, cropped, video (which was lifted from the Instagram account of someone who was there) go viral. That account was supposedly run by a high-school teacher in California — a woman…
