People Will Stop Committing Race Hoaxes When They Stop Getting Results

[SVPete]

https://pjmedia.com/trending/people-will-stop-committing-race-hoaxes-when-it-stops-getting-results/

Did you see that story last week about the Muslim waiter in Texas who said a customer stiffed him on the customary gratuity and scrawled "We don't tip terrorist (sic)" on the receipt? You probably said to yourself, "That's awful! I can't believe somebody would do that. Is this really where we are as a society?" Then you congratulated yourself on being so much more enlightened and sophisticated than such people.

Or, maybe you've paid attention to the news at some point in the past few decades, and you saw a story like that and remembered that these things are almost* always hoaxes.
...
... The explanation is obvious: He did it to get attention. And why did he think it would succeed? Because it always does.

Race hoaxes can take different forms. Sometimes, as with the "Bigoted note on the restaurant receipt" genre that's become popular in recent years, the hoaxer will make him- or herself the victim. Other times, the hoaxer seizes on minor slights or aggravations committed by others, and exploits them to make him- or herself the victim.
...
In 2018 America, victimhood is currency. If you want people to stop making martyrs of themselves, stop rewarding them for it. Stop spreading obvious hoaxes, just because you want to congratulate yourself on being better than somebody who would write a bigoted note on a restaurant receipt. Stop signaling your virtue to the other members of your tribe.

Or maybe you're thinking about committing a hoax like this, or exploiting a hoax like this, to "raise awareness"? Please don't. You're only doing the exact opposite. You're just raising awareness that too many people cynically exploit racism and bigotry for their own personal gain. You're making things tougher for the real victims.

I go farther than Jim Treacher does. Not rewarding hoaxers is necessary (though the MSM really cannot be stopped, making this side of the coin less than realistic). Punishing hoaxers, i.e. negative consequences, is, IMO, entirely necessary if discouraging future hoaxes is a purpose.

That hoaxes provide cover for real A-holes is pretty much axiomatic. Another side of the hoax-results coin is that even when a hoax is exposed many who were the target audience of the hoax still believe it. An example of the latter would be the persistence of the false hands up, don't shoot narrative among BLM types and their sympathizers.

[docstew]

They could treat it the way that Stolen Valor is treated: if the perp receives or hopes to receive ANY benefit, tangible or intangible (including sympathy for being a poor downtrodden POC), then it is simple fraud and can be prosecuted as such.  Media companies who push these stories and then fail to issue corrections (fake but accurate) and denounce hoaxers could be prosecuted for accomplice after the fact, and conspiracy.

Put a few hoaxers in jail, along with the reporters and editors who push the stories, and it'll dry up.

[Texacon]

To add to what both of y'all are saying, I think if there are any damages done to the person/people/organization/business, then the hoaxer needs to pay treble damages and/or have a lengthened sentence.

Those idiots at DU were (and some still are on one of the threads) calling for doxing the guy who supposedly wrote the message and getting him fired from his job!  Wow.  First rattle out of the box. 

I just don't believe any of this anymore.  None of it.  When the evidence is in and it shows that it actually happened, yeah, but until then I just act like it is a lie and most of the time it is.

KC

[SVPete]

https://freebeacon.com/blog/please-please-please-stop-reporting-viral-receipt-stories/

Please, Please, Please Stop Reporting on Viral Receipt Stories

I think you get the pattern.

Those are just the verified hoaxes I could remember off the top of my head. And that's not even counting the receipts where the veracity was never proven one way or the other, but journalists ran with them anyway.
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It is laughably easy to fake a handwritten note on a receipt. The upsides are high– attention, social media boost, fifteen minutes of fame, crowdsourced donations, and all the other benefits of having your victimhood officially corroborated. The downsides are low if you avoid naming the customer– at worst you get fired from a low-level job you already obviously despise. And yet time and time again the media elevate these claims, often with little to no skepticism (the original Washington Post headline on the "terrorist" note stated without hedging that "Texas restaurant bans customer who left racist note to waiter").

There are of course receipt stories that turn out to be true. A waiter really did call his customers the n-word on their receipt back in 2016. A receipt that went viral among conservatives showing a customer using food stamps to purchase nothing but steaks and lobsters surprisingly turned out to be real (investigators arrested the man for a scheme in which he resold the items at half their value). ...

That'd be the case even if there was obvious news value to these stories. But there are millions of interactions between servers and customers of all stripes in a given week and virtually none of them end in overt race hatred. Why focus on the fact that one person wrote something Islamaphobic to another person in a state with 28 million people, even if it were true?

The answer of course is that there's a market for stories that confirm our worst suspicions about our fellow Americans. Readers of these stories aren't looking for evidence that some guy is an open bigot. They're looking for evidence that millions of people are secret bigots, people who live in places like Texas, Kansas, Tennessee, small-town New Jersey, etc.

Media outlets that fall for receipt stories don't just misinform their audience, they do so in a way that damages our nation's social cohesion. It's bad enough giving undue focus to true stories that don't represent the reality of race, religion, and sexual orientation in America. But when an entire genre of stories turns out to be a hoax over and over and over, it's time to retire it altogether.

1.) No, this person did not read what I posted above before posting this opinion article. The Date stamps demonstrate this.

2.) No, I did not read this prior to posting my OP. You'll have to take my word for it.

The points I made, the OP link author made and this WashBeacon author made are so basic that readers of the MSM and major NewMedia should be screaming these messages at their sources!

[Texacon]

https://freebeacon.com/blog/please-please-please-stop-reporting-viral-receipt-stories/

Please, Please, Please Stop Reporting on Viral Receipt Stories

1.) No, this person did not read what I posted above before posting this opinion article. The Date stamps demonstrate this.

2.) No, I did not read this prior to posting my OP. You'll have to take my word for it.

The points I made, the OP link author made and this WashBeacon author made are so basic that readers of the MSM and major NewMedia should be screaming these messages at their sources!

That was a good read.

KC