Hoax

“ No wonder she was cross!
Each time I tried something harder. One day when visiting in the country, I dressed as a beggar, and going to a neighbour’s, while the good housewife was in the pantry getting me something to eat, stole her spectacles, took my food and went my way. Returning shortly after, with the other girls, I delivered the spectacles to the incredulous victim of my hoax. ”

“ It occurred to me that my friends might have conceived and executed an elaborate hoax—and then I dismissed the idea, instantly. There were no scientists among them who could make a man materialize out of nothingness. ”

“ Human nature—-and there is a good deal of it in a large manufacturing centre—could not be restrained in the neighbourhood of such a relic of a past generation, and, consequently, that form of pleasantry known as the hoax was constantly attempted upon him. One morning the correspondence columns, which he was supposed to edit with scrupulous care, appeared headed with an account of the discovery of some ancient pottery bearing a Latin inscription—the most venerable and certainly the most transparent of newspaper hoaxes. ”

“ He also wrote letters to The Daily Chronicle and Nature, but both these periodicals, suspecting a hoax, asked him to reconsider his action before they printed, and he was advised that such a strange story, unfortunately so bare of supporting evidence, might imperil his reputation as an investigator. ”

“ Uncompromising deniers of facts, rebels against evidence, may be all the more positive, and may declare that the writers of these extraordinary narratives are persons fond of a joke, who have written them to hoax me, and that there have been persons in all ages who have done the same thing to mystify thinkers who have taken up such questions. ”

“ It is a matter of congratulation to mankind that the writer of the hoax, with an apology (Heaven save the mark!) spared us Herschel’s notes of “the Moon’s tropical, sidereal, and synodic revolutions,” and the “phenomena of the syzygies,” and proceeded at once to the pith of the subject. ”

“ Use is second nature in literature as well as in anything else; and the public, being accustomed to falsehood, would regard the absence of even the most flagrant hoax as a curtailment of the fair proportions of history. ”

“ You think that an air of dignified innocence will undo the damage done? I am well aware of your experiments with the y wave, gentlemen—and it was on the y wave that the messages came. You may be interested to know that the number of lives lost, the property damage, the business losses due to the panic, have not yet been fully determined; but it makes the hysteria following the Fantafilm hoax very small potatoes by comparison. ”

“ He is a constitutional liar; and the fellow has such a plausible mode of lying, and wears throughout such a fixed and solemn phiz, that his news has been circulated by us all, with all our wise reasons, and explanations, and conjectures, that although we are sometimes angry enough to knock his brains out, we cannot help laughing at the hoax. ”

“ The hoax was finally exposed by Professor Othniel C. Marsh of Yale; and George Hall of Binghamton, N.Y., confessed to the fraud, his object having been to discredit belief in the “giants” of Genesis vi. 4. (See “The Cardiff Giant: the True Story of a Remarkable Deception,” by Andrew D. White, in the Century Magazine, vol. xlii., 1902.) ”

“ Is there a more contemptible creature in the world than the newspaper hoaxer? The wretch who can see fun in obtaining the publication of some filthy phrase in a newspaper that is certain to be read by numbers of women, should, in my mind, be treated as the flinger of a dynamite bomb among a crowd of innocent people. The sender of a false notice of a marriage, a birth, or a death, is usually difficult to bring to justice, but when found, he—or she—should be treated as a social leper. ”

“ Grose, Vulg. Tongue (3rd Ed.) , s.v.
1811. Lexicon Balatronicum, s.v. Hoaxing. Bantering, ridiculing. Hoaxing a quiz; joking an odd fellow.—University wit.
1815. Scott, Guy Mannering, ch. iii. Whose humble efforts at jocularity were chiefly confined to what were then called bites and bams, since denominated hoaxes and quizzes.
1835–7. Richardson, Dict. Eng. Lang., s.v. Hoax. Malone considers the modern slang hoax as derived from hocus, and Archdeacon Nares agrees with him.
Verb. To play a practical joke; to ‘take-in’; to bite (q.v.) . See subs. sense. For synonyms, see Gammon. ”

“ A hoax which usually creates a sensation, but which is apt, ultimately, to have a decidedly bad effect on believers’ nerves, consists in allowing some person to183 touch or even fondle a materialized Spirit. One such demonstration occurred in a Southern city, where there lived a medium known as Mrs. ”

“ Appreciate the historical context, causes and consequences of propaganda and news hoaxes Be able to appreciate the role and value of news satire in critiquing power-wielders, while also understanding the confusion it can cause within audiences Understand the new features of ‘fake news’ architecture (such as automated ‘bots’ and social media virality) , in contrast with historical manifestations. Be able to report on the ‘fake news’ crisis with more nuance Module Format This module is designed to be delivered face-to-face or online. ”

“ As one-to-many communications developed in the 20th century, especially with the advent of radio and television, satirical news evolved, sometimes being mistaken as the real thing in news consumers’ minds. Finally, as this guide illustrates, the arrival of the internet in the late 20th century, followed by social media in the 21st century, dramatically multiplied the risks of misinformation, disinformation, propaganda and hoaxes. ”

“ I have no doubt you will get through the business very well, Mr Hoaxem, particularly if you be 'frank and explicit;' that is the right line to take when you wish to conceal your own mind and to confuse the minds of others. ”

“ If there be something in the nature and designs of the conspiracy, so odious in its means, its character, and its objects, as to enlist against the conspirators sensations of horror, indignation, and contempt, one gains from public feeling very much more by its discovery and exposure, than even by the power of fear over the disaffected, and the elevation of triumph on the part of the well disposed. ”

“ But here is a mind that can with one bold dive reach the inner mysteries of the sensible and supersensible world, penetrate the motives and impulses that govern the specific moral acts of men, and disclose at once to us the horrible secret of a conspiracy which, without preconcert, has been entered into by thousands of men, women, and children in all parts of the land, to cheat the rest of the human race—a conspiracy, too, in which certain members of innumerable private families have banded together to play tricks upon their fathers, mothers, brothers, and sisters! ”

“ Under a lie (that is, a mutual secrecy) , I sell it to the landlord of the Bell at Maidstone, say.... My landlord sells it to a customer under a lie. We are all engaged in crime, conspiracy, and falsehood; nay, if the revenue looks too closely after us, we out with our pistols, and to crime and conspiracy add murder. Do you suppose men engaged in lying every day will scruple about a false oath in a witness-box? Crime engenders crime, sir.”—Denis Duval, chap. vii.
[34] From Sir Walter Scott we might gather numerous examples and aphorisms to the purpose. ”

“ We review the empirical psychological literature on the antecedents, consequences, and communication of conspiracy theories, highlighting the abundance of research but also its disorganization. We propose a definition of conspiracy theories based on some of their inherent characteristics. In our definition, we focus on the key defining feature of publicness, in that conspiracy theories concern events and phenomena that the public do not (but should) know about. ”

“ The fruit of conspiracy, long manured with fraud and falsehood and all the furtive impurities of intrigue, was now ripe even to rottenness, and ready to fall into the hands already stretched towards it—into the lips yet open to protest that no one—the accuser himself must know it—that no one was dreaming of a second French empire. ”

“ In fact, there is no other department of spiritism to which the taint of fraud has so thoroughly attached itself. It is obvious that any clever charlatan, by persuading his sitters that darkness is necessary for the development of occult phenomena, can produce most mystifying effects, and the records of scientific investigations, to say nothing of the records of our police courts, abound in evidence that swindlers have not been slow in availing themselves of this opportunity to prey on the credulous and superstitious. ”

“ Now, these gentlemen bring forward a law to protect the United States Government, and they bring that forward as an evidence of conspiracy, as evidence of a fraud. Nothing could be more unfair, nothing on earth could show a greater want of character. ”

“ You’ve been the tool of a conspiracy to swindle the public; it was your religious standing that made the swindle possible. No one’s called you a thief as yet, but that’s what everyone’s thinking. I know you’re not a thief, but you’ve been guilty of the grossest negligence. ”

“ Conspiracy Theories Are Oppositional From the core definition of conspiracy theory as the belief that a conspiracy that the public should know about has been concealed from them, we can logically deduce a key defining characteristic. Conspiracy theories are set up, explicitly or implicitly, in opposition to a publicly accepted version of reality. They imply that a false version of reality has been promoted or protected by the conspirators and their unwitting stooges. ”

“ But, while tracing the history of the Great Conspiracy, from its obscure birth in the brooding brains of a few ambitious men of the earliest days of our Republic, through the subsequent years of its devolution, down to the evil days of Nullification, and to the bitter and bloody period of armed Rebellion, or contemplating it in its still more recent and, perhaps, more sinister development, of to-day, he has conscientiously dealt with it, throughout, in the clear and penetrating light of the voluminous records so readily accessible at the seat of our National Government. ”

“ Within but very few years of the present date, we have had the spectacle of millions, literally millions, of the people of England, yielding an absolute credence to the most monstrous delusions respecting public questions and measures, imposed on them by dishonest artifice, and what may be called moral incendiarism; and these delusions of a nature to excite the passions of the multitude to crime. ”

“ The analysis of conspiracy theories we have advanced in this article suggests that something analogous may be said about the collective. Conspiracy theories have a creative, world-making potential, and if anything may make the world in their own image—a world in which trust and benevolence are in short supply, evidence cannot be trusted, social groups have few interests in common, and power is concentrated in the hands of a few. Left unchecked and unchallenged, conspiracy theories threaten to become self-fulfilling prophecies. ”

“ To our knowledge, not one study has systematically manipulated the presence versus absence of essential features of conspiracy theories. Nor have studies sought to identify which of the key features of conspiracy theories are the active ingredients, or mediators, of their functional differences from other beliefs—for example, whether the malevolence ascribed by conspiracy theories explains why they are more likely than other explanations for social phenomena to foment intergroup hostility. ”

“ Or, admitting a conspiracy, do they mean to deny only that Frank Knapp, the prisoner at the bar, was abetting in the murder, being present, and so deny that he was a principal? If a conspiracy is proved, it bears closely upon every subsequent subject of inquiry. ”

“ They further admit a belief that the degrees of criminality in the individuals who compose the conspiracy, are very different, as it appears to be a principle with the authors of this institution to cloak their real design under false colours. Can we desire a stronger proof of the warm attachment of the people to these measures, than that the leaders of a wicked conspiracy, such as that disclosed in the report, have been enabled by holding them forth as their ostensible objects, to organize a force so formidable, as almost to brave the strength of the established government? ”

“ The point upon which everything turns is the secret, and therefore dangerous, character of the conspiracy, which, as we are told, completely eluded the vigilance of the authorities, and was on the very verge of success before even a breath of suspicion was aroused, being balked only by a lucky accident occurring at the eleventh hour, in a manner fitly described as miraculous. ”

“ Turning to the social communication of conspiracy theories, we can predict that the malevolence of the plots they allege will affect the motivation to share them. Stories about nonconspiracies, or benign conspiracies, will not have the same appeal to communicators who want to justify or profit from intergroup hostility. ”

“ But secret falsehood, which in the Lord's sight is the same as open falsehood,—secret falsehood, under all its various forms of misrepresentation, deception, cunning, is daily and hourly committed by how many? by how many, too, who think that they would scorn to be guilty of a direct falsehood? Look through the business world. ”

“ Unmask the deceivers, spread the truth and do not fear. If it were a matter of spreading deception and murder, then of course, it would be terrible, but here you would be spreading the freedom from deception and murder. Besides, there is no ground for fear. Of whom? They ... are themselves afraid.
I remember there worked for us in our village a weak and phlegmatic 12 year-old boy who once caught on the road and brought back, an enormous healthy peasant, a thief, who had taken a coat from the hall. ”