Why Did the “4.7% of Blacks Voted” Myth Spread So Fast?
Tuesday evening, as the polls were closing in most of the country, a young black Milwaukeean named Andre Douglas tweeted that only 4.7% of blacks had voted in his home state. It’s still not quite clear where he got this incorrect information — my best guess is that he or someone he knew misread a report that only 4.7% of Wisconsin voters had been African American — but the stat spread like wildfire on Twitter that night, quickly losing its connection to Wisconsin and becoming a “fact” about the country as a whole.
The claim was greeted with skepticism by many, but the doubters were overwhelmed by the believers. The story was repeated so often that it — combined with the news that the US Senate would be losing its only black member — turned the term “African Americans” into a Twitter trending topic for much of Wednesday.
Why did this false claim, first made by a guy with fewer than three hundred followers, blow up so big? Three reasons, I think…
First, it couldn’t be easily debunked.
You might think that how many African Americans voted in this week’s election would be a fact you could