A brief scroll through this list may be all it takes to convince you that reality is often stranger than fiction. Even in this modern world where few things can genuinely knock us off our feet, people (and animals!) still manage to surprise us with the most absurd actions that exceed our expectations. News stories ranging from charmingly unexpected to plainly bizarre inevitably lead to funny headlines that are gaining popularity online every day. But this does beg the question: why are we so fascinated with them in the first place?
To learn more about the abundance of weird news items and the fine line between an informative headline and a fake one, we reached out to Deborah S. Bowen, Ph.D., an Assistant Professor of PR Instruction at the University of South Florida. When asked what impact the digital world had on the spread of weird news stories, she told Bored Panda, "Because of its relative accessibility, the internet has become a powerful dissemination tool."
"Those fun stories from far-flung places (or not so far-flung!) are much more available now. People can amplify all kinds of messages across any number of platforms and can cast a net as wide as their imaginations," the professor added. "And all this posting can be done at no cost. It can even become a moneymaker for the person aggregating and publishing these wild tales. Besides, we love entertainment, and what’s more entertaining than the truth?"
Consider the Florida man scenario. The slew of stories that begin with those two words makes it look like the state is occupied by the wackiest and weirdest people ever. As a Florida resident, Bowen shared a few thoughts on the matter.
"Some might suggest that many stereotypes are rooted in some grain of truth," she explained. "I suggest that Florida arrests are part of the public record, and therefore become excellent content for communicators across the media! Admittedly, though, there's nothing like seeing 'Florida Man' in a headline and wondering, 'will THIS be the one I know?!'"
When it comes to our passion for these stories, the professor explained that their catchy and odd nature is what tends to spark our curiosity. "The best headlines — the infamous 'Headless Body in Topless Bar' being the classic archetype — grab the reader’s attention immediately and invite the reader on a newsworthy adventure."
After all, getting your headline clicked on is far from an easy task. The words you choose to wrap your title in are the first, and probably the only, impression you make on the potential reader. "It’s awfully hard to make day-to-day happenings sound cool and sexy; it’s much easier when a story is so absurd that the headline becomes an easy 'get' for the author," Bowen said.
"Wild headlines promise a real escape for a reader, and we crave, as humans, the emotional release that can come from reading a truth so different from our own. Whether hilarious or sad or evoking Schadenfreude [a German word meaning the pleasure we get from witnessing someone's misfortune], readers want the impact of the tale to be significant — to deliver the emotional punch promised by the headline."
While it’s fun to devour stories that bend the limits of our imagination, they also serve as proof that anything can be considered newsworthy these days. The problem is that with the heaps of information that consistently grace our feeds, it has become difficult to differentiate facts from fiction.
"One of my favorite sayings is 'Content without context is just noise,'" Professor Bowen noted. "It’s critical that we become informed and savvy consumers of media, and that we take no information for granted as truth. A headline tossed out casually on, say, a social media platform should always be questioned, even if the source is knowledgeable. Find the reporter or author. What has that person contributed to the news before? Is there an 'angle'? A bias?"
But many readers forget to do their own due diligence before sharing stories on social media. In an attempt to prove it, the satirical news site the Science Post published a piece with a frightening headline: "Study: 70% of Facebook users only read the headline of science stories before commenting." The content of the text, however, was mostly blocks of "lorem ipsum" text. As of today, it has been shared over 194k times.
Interestingly, it inspired researchers at Columbia University and the French National Institute to do an independent study of news consumption on social media. They collected the number of Twitter’s 280 million followers who potentially viewed and shared a news link and how many clicks those same links amassed. The researchers found that 59% of links shared on social media have never actually been clicked — users retweeted the news without bothering to read it.
"People are more willing to share an article than read it," study co-author Arnaud Legout said. "This is typical of modern information consumption. People form an opinion based on a summary, or summary of summaries, without making the effort to go deeper."
