Posted on: April 29, 2024, 08:09h.
Last updated on: April 29, 2024, 12:55h.
Taylor Swift and her boyfriend, Travis Kelce, returned to the Las Vegas Strip this weekend, to attend Patrick Mahomes’ Las Vegas Golf Tournament dinner on Saturday night at the Bellagio. They were much better behaved than during their last appearance together in Sin City, when they were ejected from Gordon Ramsay’s Hell’s Kitchen for getting too drunk while celebrating his team’s Super Bowl win.
Except that this never happened.
According to the website latherland.com, when the Caesars Palace restaurant, which books out months in advance, didn’t have a table to offer them, another couple generously offered theirs in exchange for Swift’s autograph. Then the most famous couple in America used it to get “sloppy drunk” and “treat the place like it was the living room of her Manhattan penthouse.”
Gordon Ramsay himself — summoned from his Caesars suite by the flustered maître de — yelled obscenities at the most famous couple in America while kicking them to the curb.
I’d Lie
As far as we can tell, neither Swift nor Kelce has ever been to Hell’s Kitchen. It was Travis’ mom, Donna, who celebrated her son’s Super Bowl win there.
“Thanks @gordongram for an excellent visit to @hellskitchen,” she wrote on Instagram. She never got to meet Ramsay, though — perhaps because she wasn’t drunk or rowdy enough.
Latherland.com is another in a growing number of “satire news” sites that poop out an incessant stream of digital diarrhea crafted for maximum social-media shareability without a hint of the humor, sarcasm, or occasional genius of The Onion.
It’s owned by Christopher Blair, a Portland, Maine resident described by BBC News as “the godfather of fake news.”
Blair excuses his “profession” by claiming that his sites, which also include the Dunning-Kruger Times, have an important lesson to teach their misinformed readers.
That lesson is that you should always read a website’s “About Us” page before passing along its information. If anyone bothered reading Latherland’s, they would see its admitted dedication to “parody, satire, and tomfoolery.”
Sadly, most social media users read nothing more than a headline before sharing a story that grabs their attention — a fact of which Blair is well aware since it pays his bills.
A February 16 sharing of the fake Hell’s Kitchen story, by a Facebook page operated by Blair, garnered more than 25K likes, 5,000 shares, and 5,400 comments.
The comments included: “Some role model!” from Jeri Moore Liebengood, “Good job Chef!” from Gloria Valadez-Stephenson, and “Wow … very telling!” from Karen Bock Hoffman.
The story spread wildly enough for the news service Reuters to deem it worthy of debunking in its “Fact Check” series.
Fake News’ Real Harm
Back when the Weekly World News existed as a tabloid at supermarket checkout stands, it was fun to buy a copy to chuckle at stories such as “I was Bigfoot’s Love Slave,” “3,000-Year-Old Mummy Has Baby Boy” and “Five U.S. Senators are Space Aliens.”
Yet “satire news” sites rarely if ever make claims outlandish enough to register as satire. That’s because they exist not to entertain people, but purely to trick them into believing lies. And this is not difficult, since social media algorithms don’t currently distinguish between true and false stories.
For Gen Z — those born between 1997 and 2012 — social media is their main source of information about the world. A 2022 study by Reuters found that 39% of 18-to-24-year-olds consulted only social media to stay informed, versus 34% who also visited the legitimate news websites and apps still frequented by older generations.
To those 39%, the source of a shared story is rarely ever checked or even important. And Christopher Blair’s stories do nothing to change this scary fact. They only add to America’s increasing mistrust of legitimate media, and to Blair’s bank account.
“As for the morality, what the fuck ever,” Blair wrote on the Dunning-Kruger Times’ “About Us” page. “I own a bunch of stuff, I’ve been building it for years, it makes me a nice living. Don’t like it? I don’t care.”
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