Two evidence-fitting modes
Convergent and divergent evidence-fitting
Woke up to the France has fallen hashtag, and I have barely dug into it. But the first thing that popped up in my feeds was a tall apartment building on fire.
I’ve talked about evidence-fitting a bit over the past couple weeks. I see evidence fitting as falling into two modes:
Divergent evidence-fitting is the sort of thing we saw with the smoke events in New York and the Midwest. An event happens, and multiple online communities try to figure out how to map that event to the open argument of their choosing. E.g. the smoke is a taste of climate change to come, the smoke is more evidence the government is trying to poison us.
Convergent evidence fitting is what we see above. There is a central event and narrative and the community races to fill it in, often with false and miscontextualized “evidence”. This building on fire is supposedly a victim of current riots there, but is actually a video of a fire last year in Dubai.
The difference between the two is this — in the first case there is a piece of evidence that has attention, and must be slotted into arguments. In the second case, there is an argument, and the community goes out to find evidence to fit the argument (whether real, fake, or in-between).
I don’t know that these are the perfect terms — they are borrowed from the rumor literature and the talk about convergent and divergent rumor there. The two modes themselves, on the other hand, I feel pretty confident about. Having studied election rumor for a couple of years, I can confidently say we see both these modes.