File photo of Texas Gov. Greg Abbott speaking during a news conference at the Texas State Capitol on … [+] June 8, 2023 in Austin, Texas. (Photo by Brandon Bell/Getty Images)
Texas Gov. Greg Abbott tweeted an article on Sunday about Garth Brooks getting booed off stage. The story described how Brooks was performing in the Texas city of Hambriston when “patriots” booed the country music legend mercilessly before he finally left after just two minutes. But there are a couple of big problems with Abbott’s tweet: The city of Hambriston doesn’t exist, and the article is completely fake.
“Go woke. Go broke,” Abbott tweeted in a popular refrain from conservative commentators, adding, “Good job Texas.”
Many conservatives are currently upset with Brooks after the country music star said that everyone was welcome at his new bar, the Friends In Low Places Bar & Honky Tonk, in Nashville, Tennessee. Brooks was responding to the anti-trans campaign that first started against Bud Light when the beer brand sent some cans to trans influencer Dylan Mulvaney. Brooks said he’d serve all kinds of beer at his bar, a clear nod to the controversy.
But the article shared by Gov. Abbott isn’t real. The link directs to something called the Dunning Kruger Times, a satirical website that parodies a right-wing perspective on the news. If the name of the website sounds familiar, that’s probably because the website keeps going viral on conservative Twitter with many people failing to understand that it’s satire.
The tweet from Greg Abbott on Sunday with a fake story about Garth Brooks.
In fact, last week the Dunning Kruger Times published a fake article claiming that investors had pulled out of Brooks’s new bar in Nashville, a claim that isn’t true. But that didn’t stop a lot of people on Twitter from sharing it.
The Dunning Kruger Times also went viral earlier this month after an article claimed that KitchenAid had pulled all of its products from Target in response to LGBT Pride displays at the retailer. That claim was also untrue.
Celebrities and brands embracing their LGBT fans have been an extremely popular point of contention for many influencers online, with people like Ben Shapiro and Matt Walsh stirring up hatred for the LGBT community. But it’s rare to see such a prominent politician as Gov. Abbott share an obviously fake article. Abbott is the governor of Texas and either didn’t actually read the story before he shared it or didn’t register that a city named Hambriston doesn’t exist.
There’s a lot of concern that artificial intelligence tools like MidJourney have opened the floodgates when it comes to creating fake images. But Abbott’s tweet is a great reminder that old-fashioned fake news is still a problem even without AI-generated fakery.
The Dunning-Kruger Effect, it should be noted, refers to an idea in psychology that the people with the lowest cognitive abilities are the most likely to overestimate their knowledge. Whether you agree with the website’s satire or not, it’s an aptly named site given how many times it’s gone viral with fake stories over the past month.
We’ll almost certainly see many more politically themed fakes in the months ahead. The first Republican primary debate is in August, but we’ve already witnessed the Republican National Committee use artificial intelligence to create an apocalyptic ad imagining what a second term would look like under President Joe Biden. And former president Donald Trump shared a fake photo of himself praying that was actually generated using AI. But Trump is no stranger to fakery. After all, this is the guy who photoshopped himself in 2019 to look slimmer and gave himself longer fingers.
It’s going to be a wild political season in the lead up to the 2024 presidential election, that’s for sure.
Update: It now appears Greg Abbott has deleted his tweet, but I’ve shared a screenshot of it above for posterity’s sake.
