Flex and Frooms, Flex and Frooms. This is the Flex and Frooms catch up podcast. Should you fear ai? Potentially? But how much do you fear the spread of misinformation for a bit of a joke. I'm no stranger to it. I'm actually more of an acquaintance to it. I didn't know that people lied on the Internet as much as they do. Case in point, when we read out listener submissions and things like that, I honestly think they're all real.
And there have been a few on occasion where rooms might say that's definitely fake, because I'm like, why would it be? Why wouldn't it be? Because I just for far less. Yeah, if you over the last few weeks have seen the rise of this eighties horror z Apothera that's somehow this cult classic, but you've also never heard of it, You're actually not alone. This has been one of the I would say one of the fastest growing
internet hoaxes I've seen in a little while. It went from zero to one hundred in literally two or three days. So this movie Zepither started popping up online. Where were you when it started? I was at home dodging these tiktoks. People were like oh you look just like Zepether. I love this movie. I'm so glad people are talking about it. I don't really care about indie films like that, so
I just didn't think it was for me. Come to find out, it all started because a TikToker by the name of Emily Jeffrey E. M I l y je double FRII uploaded a video captioned okay, so new bit ideas. What if we created a fake eighties horror movie called Zeppether and started commenting on people's TikTok saying things like, oh my god, you look exactly like that one girl from Zepether. Oh wait, you look exactly like in character
from Zepether. They added that we can make new law and new main characters as we go and convince thousands of people that this weird titled eighties horror film actually exists. And it sounds strange, but it literally worked. The hashtag is over one hundred and twenty million views, and someone even created a twenty twenty four remake of the fake
eighties movie in a trailer. But the thing is, if we're losing the ability to fact check, or we're believing that when things are expressed with conviction that they're true, Like, what is that spectrum of danger? Because how many ways could we recreate this hype for fun? How many in cell groups, far right groups, far left groups, whatever, could just decide? Why don't we just spread this thing because it's fun, and we'll do all the things that make
it seem legitimate. We'll get a website, we'll make social media pages for it, We'll get a Twitter, an x threads, a TikTok, we'll get little shirts made, we'll get a letterhead. How would we know that it wasn't real? And then the worst thing about not being able to discern if something is real or not, you doubt yourself. Yeah, then you think you're unreliable and become more susceptible to this information.
Honestly, this is not new news.
It's not. But then I think, for me, it's just like how quickly things become popular, Like I saw the remnants of this Zeppether stuff before I even knew what it was, So it had already peppered my timeline enough for me to clock that I had seen it. It's already in my brain. I didn't even consent to that. And if I went to go seek information, I would
find it and it would affirm this fake narrative. I think when I initially started hearing the term of fake news around Trump's election, I thought that it was just so aligned with a certain demographic of person who just wasn't that Internet savvy. Yeah, you know, an older demographic who's stuck on Facebook, stuck on WhatsApp is easily kind of shocked into acting. You know, you put the bright red font on the news article and you use like
the salacious headlines, and everybody's freaking out. But young people, will we know better? Right? Like we can? You know, it's the letterhead's got to be in Times New Roman. That's legitimate. You know, we're not writing articles in calibri, okay,
But it's so much more than that. And I feel as though I also assumed that fake news was coming from an organized source initially, like it's an organized group of people or people with a single mission or a single mind gathering together to disseminate it far and wide with a group of people who are all like minded, right,
organizational gathering. This was just a single person doing a little bit, and people opted in on their own, and then it was able to spread just with that minor opt in, and it wasn't like people were adding heaps of juice or heaps of depth to the law. It was just a little bit here and there, a TikTok here and there. But I saw one too many that I was like, Oh, it must be a real thing.
What if I didn't know it was fake? And then I talked to someone in the office and I was like, what about Zeppatha, Like, yeah, I love that cult movie. Because people would do that, they would be like, yeah, no, I've seen this so much about it, I can't wait to watch it. It's strange. You are one of the very few people I know that read news often. So clearly you're going to reputable sites, right, studying smah whatever. But we're assuming that information is reputable because of the banner
that it's on. That information can change. New sites have uploaded information that's wrong before, but you're going to the source. Most other people rely on the information to come to them through social media, and usually we measure the importance of this information by how frequently we're seeing it. So, for example, I saw one or two tiktoks about the wildfire in Maui, right, and then I was like, Oh, that's crazy, and then it was my whole feed and
I was like, oh, I should research this. This is hectic, this is this is really important. Had i've not seen those initial two tiktoks, I don't think I haven't seen on the news.
I don't idly know that was the thing.
Yeah see yeah, and look you go to new sites and they're not talking about it, so like, how are we meant to discern what is important to keep track of? And then I feel like, because it's really difficult to tell what news is real and not real, we get into conspiracy territory really really quickly when you preemptively have this like skepticism about information, which is not helpful either.
The reason why I know that, like life is moving fast is because I lied to really remember when conspiracy theories were funny, Like there was actually a time where like nine eleven conspiracies were like a meme and the term conspiracy theory wasn't common parlance, Like it wasn't a.
Thing that actually gets us.
And also we can't be thinking where above it, Like there's been exactly times where I've like almost hit on the oz post link that I'm.
Getting ready to ship. Yeah, yeah, oh no that yeah, I mean no.
You Mickey showed me one today.
What was it, Mickey? Your Spotify has finished? That might have goropped me.
And also, you know what, Spotify messaged me a little while back to tell me that they'd taken down through me Fridays, which seems been restated. The email they sent me look to so fake.
When you posted it. So there was no letterhead, there was no nothing.
It looked like the most like stuff.
And I guess there's no incentive for it to be changed, right, because if we think this is for sinister motives, most people, corporation's brands can benefit from fake news. Right. You can deliver information in a way that it's meant to be polarizing and it's meant to start conversation. But after we've started conversation, people aren't doing additional research. I'm finding that a lot of people struggle to dismount off the cliff
of conspiracy. They kind of just get there and stay there, and then everything becomes painted with the same brush of skepticism and there's nothing you can do about it. Well, on that note, sorry, friends, but I will say if we take out anything sinister about what could possibly happen with the way this was spread. I'm kind of impressed from a little a little TikTok about what if we did this one thing and everybody got on board. It's
because we desire a community, truly. Bye. Mickey's actually the cult leader. You've been listening to The Flex and Froom's daily podcast.
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