Lolcow Journalism

Did Gawker get its false story about Thomas Chatterton Williams from an anonymous internet message board?

On Monday, Gawker published a story alleging that Bard College professor and author Thomas Chatterton Williams had attended the Austin premiere of Alex’s War, Alex Lee Moyer’s indie documentary about Alex Jones. The article was short, written in a sneering tone, and implied that by attending the documentary film premiere, Williams, who describes himself as a liberal, was endorsing Jones and thereby exposing himself as hypocrite and possibly a closet right-winger. The problem, as Williams subsequently pointed out, is that he wasn’t at the film premiere, wasn’t in the city where it took place, and had never been contacted for comment by the Gawker writer, Tarpley Hitt, who made the allegations.

According to a tweet by Williams, Gawker had an “established pattern of defamation” with him. He cited the Gawker Staff Guidelines distributed by Editor in Chief Leah Finnegan, which listed his name on an approved roster of people Gawker could target in its articles.

The article about Williams has since been completely removed from Gawker’s website, but Gawker briefly offered a partial correction appended to the original post (which it retitled “Losers Pal Around Alex Jones Premiere” from “Thomas Chatterton Williams Pals Around with Fellow Losers at Alex Jones Premiere”): 

Update: On Monday, we were tipped off that Thomas Chatterton Williams attended this premiere. Unfortunately, we were wrong. We apologize for the error.

The claim was challenged on Twitter by Anna Khachiyan, co-host of the popular podcast “Red Scare,” who did attend the premiere. On Instagram, Khachiyan had reposted a photo of Williams in a “Red Scare” T-shirt that was taken in a different setting along with photos of the event and speculated that this had led to Gawker assuming Williams had attended the premiere.

But there’s another possibility for how the false story was hatched that, like Khachiyan’s theory, also underscores how much digital journalism relies on scouring the internet for gossip that can be repacked as news stories. It’s possible that Hitt was skimming the imageboard lolcow.farm, which mixes gossip about “very online” personalities with a 4chan-like irreverent sensibility. In fact, two days prior to the Gawker article, a photo of Thomas Chatterton Williams had been posted on lolcow in the middle of a conversation about photos taken at the Jones film premiere.

Hitt did not respond to The Scroll’s request for comment.

The posts preceding and following it are about the Alex’s War premiere, and two also include photos screenshotted from Anna Khachiyan’s Instagram story:

Later, there was also a post about the Gawker article:

While the lolcow poster in question wasn’t alleging that Williams attended the premiere, it’s plausible that someone scanning the thread would have assumed that was the case.

There is also evidence that lolcow.farm is known to reporters and perhaps also weaponized by posters who know they’re being observed by journalists.

When asked about the website, former BuzzFeed reporter Joe Bernstein mentioned that it had “come up on a Google search or on the ‘Red Scare’ subreddit” while he was working on a story about the NPCC Film Festival, but it wasn’t the main source of his reporting. He added that at some point, he received a tip from somebody who claimed to be a regular poster on lolcow.farm that there was salient information for his story on the website. In Bernstein’s case, information sourced from lolcow.farm was properly fact-checked.

But Bernstein’s level of due diligence may not be the norm. The practice of sourcing stories from social media has become increasingly common in journalism, due to changes in the industry. In the late 2000s and early 2010s, budget cuts across publishing placed increased pressure on shrinking newsrooms to produce high volumes of click-worthy stories while decreasing the amount of time they had to do traditional reporting. It became easier for journalists to use social media platforms to find interesting stories.

Examples of this are myriad and cover a wide range of topics, including everything from trend reporting, in which a handful of posts are extrapolated into a movement, to more serious topics like abortion and COVID-19.

The 2019 media uproar around the Covington Catholic school students, for instance, was set in motion by journalists credulously amplifying the claims of a decontextualized viral video clip posted by an anonymous Twitter user. By the time a longer video emerged showing that the Covington students had not instigated the incident, dozens of prestige publications like The Washington Post had already spread the initial story, casually slandering a group of minors in the process. However, unlike Gawker’s response to the Williams story, few of those outlets published a retraction when their error was exposed.