There's something about the possibility of it being real that makes it more compelling. With this video, the "real story" aspect was needed to raise it above t

There's something about the possibility of it being real that makes it more compelling. With this video, the "real story" aspect was needed to raise it above the "meh" threshold to make it viral. People passing it around, knowing that it was the kind of thing that usually turns out to be a hoax, were engaged in a collective suspension of disbelief. If something becomes boring when we face up to what we already believe about it, then I think there's something wrong with pretending it wasn't boring in the first place. If there was a shortage of mildly gratifying and amusing stuff on the internet, then I would condone any means for dealing with that shortage, but damn it, that is obviously not the case. There are enough mildly amusing novelty videos in the world that we don't need to give any of them this kind of crutch. I may sound like the kind of hysterical religious nut who used to say that novels were lies, and therefore evil, because they were not literally true, but fiction is meant to be appreciated by people who know it is fiction. My standard is whether I have to cultivate a misconception about the provenance of something in order to enjoy it. The obvious weak point in my argument is that reading a novel arguably involves reading it as if it were true, and that the way we lie to ourselves when we pass around a "true" story that we know probably won't hold up is no different from the we lie to ourselves when reading a novel. That may be true. I think it's not. Anyway, why should we care? Because this is exactly the form of most of the political propaganda passed around on the internet: birther theories, black helicopters, the stories about prison camps and impending roundups (recycled from the Clinton years for Obama,) and so on. I think a sizable proportion of people who pass them around know they're not true, and simply find them gratifying. Obviously they don't mind that a large number of people end up believing them. If we're going to criticize that as intellectually wrong, then we should meet the same intellectual standards. If we accept that it's intellectually fine, then we are left arguing that their means are acceptable, and they're just working for the wrong side, instead of working for the right side like us.