Too Good to Be True

fiction disguised as fact

A strongly anti-Trump poster on a forum I am active on posted, under the title “Here’s why people don’t like ICE,” a lengthy account of misbehavior by ICE that showed up on his Facebook feed from a “friend of a friend” and that he found “pretty convincing”.

It started:

I had to sit on this for a couple of days because of how pissed off I was but here's my rant. That is the fear that I get to live with for no other reason than BREATHING WHILE BROWN IN THE USA.

I am and always will be a Costarrican who happens to be a US citizen.

Other bits — it is long enough so I don’t want to post the whole thing but you can find it here¹ —

While the phone was ringing I heard a firm, almost angry, voice from behind me say:

"Put the phone down!"

I ignored it since it couldn't possibly have been directed at me since I wasn't doing anything. Almost immediately a second voice in an even firmer voice said
"WE SAID PUT THE PHONE DOWN. NOW!!!"

At this point I turned around and saw to armed men standing very close to me. Then the first guy said again:

"Put. The. Phone. Down...Now!"

So with confused look on my face I started to put my phone in my pocket and immediately one of them said:

"Keep your hands where I can see them!" As he moved his hand closer to his gun.

I thought for a moment I was being pranked so I said:

"Well guys make up your minds. You want my phone down or my hands up?"

To which one of them replied:

"Don't get fucking cute with us."

Next that same guy asked for my name and I gave it to him. He asked where I lived and provided my address.

I at this point asked who they were and what this was about. The reply was:

"You don't fucking ask questions. We ask the questions. You answer them. Got it?!"

…

For doing nothing more than going to work while being a US citizen but brown I was very close to being taken and the worst part is that I have no idea by who or where I would have been taken. That is the fear that I get to live with for no other reason than BREATHING WHILE BROWN IN THE USA.

A second poster, on the other side of the political divide, responded that the author of the account was the sort of person who should not have citizenship.

The initial poster believed it because it provided support for his anti-Trump political views. The poster who responded believed it because a US citizen from Costa Rica critical of the US was support for his nationalist views.

Neither of them had any evidence that the story was true.

It could be, but the ICE agents in the story sound more like cartoon villains than real people, the whole account like a story designed to grab people who wanted reasons to think badly of the Trump administration and its immigration policy. Further investigation found what appeared to be the original version — posted in July of 2020.

One of my rules of thumb for historical anecdotes is to be skeptical of any that make a good enough story to have survived on their literary merits.

Take Two

The pattern repeated a few days later from the other side. There was a news story about an unfriendly interaction in a town in Scotland between an adult couple and two girls, twelve and fourteen, one of whom was carrying, and displayed, a large kitchen knife and a hatchet. Evidence available to us consisted of a video taken by one of the couple and a statement from the local police:

We are aware of misinformation being shared on social media in relation to an incident where a Bulgarian couple were approached by youths in St Ann Lane, Dundee, on Saturday, 23 August, 2025.

A 12-year-old girl has been charged with being in possession of offensive weapons. She will be referred to the relevant authorities and our enquiries are ongoing.

The one thing clear from the video, aside from the weapons, was the voice of the man telling her to show the knife, which she eventually did. No physical contact was shown and it was hard to tell how close the couple were to the girls.

Despite the very limited information — a little more came out later from a local newspaper that located and interviewed the man, a Bulgarian immigrant who had been with his wife — lots of posters on the forum and lots of people elsewhere were sure they knew the truth. Posters in the forum referred to “rapist foreigners” and “The men.” Online, I saw:

“It’s so sad that a girl so young has to carry two knives to defend herself from muslim pedophiles”

and

“forced to brandish a knife to defend herself and her friend against a migrant who attempted to assault her.”

All with no evidence of assault, attempted assault, or anything sexual.

Two accounts by supposed witnesses appeared, one on Reddit from someone who claimed to have seen the preliminaries, a group of teens and an adult couple yelling and swearing at each other, and a very different account on twitter by someone who claimed to have talked with the mother of one of the girls.

Here's the summary of what happened from Mayah's mother: "Yes. So what happened was the girls where out just walking and the man in the picture made comments to lola(the younger girl) calling her sexy and other sexual remarks then the girls started to tell this man to leave them alone and stop following them and making sexual remarks to them. After that the man's sister (also in the picture) came around the corner and physically attacked ruby(the older sister) she grabbed her hair dragged her to the floor started to punch her then both the man and woman where kicking her in head while she was on the floor. At this point my daughter (mayah) called the police so my daughters account after that is all abit blurry. But that is when lola had the weapons she pulled them out to protect ruby. After that the man came back at lola recording her making sure she showed the weapons to the camera and antagonising her. Ruby was hospitalised after the attack with a severe concussion a tennis ball sized lump to the back of her head aswell as lots of bruises."

I'm working with them to get a GiveSendGo set up. Will report back when it's live. In the meantime if you don't want to wait, we set up a coin that generates royalties which we will use to make a donation to the family. Just buying the coin generates the royalties.

Neither account was posted by a person with known identity and reputation; either could have been pure invention. The second got treated online as evidence by people who wanted to believe it. One reason not to was that the claim that the older sister had been beaten and injured before the video was taken did not fit her appearance or behavior in the video. It also seemed unlikely to me that the police account would have omitted the assault if it occurred but that was not a problem for people who took the story as support for their belief that British police routinely ignore crimes, including sexual crimes, by immigrants while punishing victims for defending themselves.

There are three other reasons not to believe the second account.

1. It describes the woman as the man’s sister while the newspaper which interviewed him says she is his wife. There is no reason why the author of the account should have known their relationship but she claims to and apparently gets it wrong. That sounds more like someone inventing details than an account by a reliable witness.

2. The story feels like something constructed to fit what people want to believe, expanding the Rotherham scandal into a more general pattern of misbehavior by immigrants and police. Too good to be true.

3. The author of the story is using it to raise money, supposedly for the girls. He does not give his realspace identity, let alone doing something to prove it, which fits a scam better than an honest fundraising project.

I believe the first account because the author, unlike the author of the second, is believably uncertain about the details of what was happening — also because it does not read like a story intended to support one side or the other.

Lessons

The Internet is an open forum, raising the problem of how to distinguish fact from fiction in things you read online.² One way is by the reputation of the source. A story published by a reputable organization or publication may be biased or mistaken but is unlikely to be entirely invented.³ A story published by someone under his real name could be, depending on the reputation of the author and whether he is likely to be damaged by having a fictional account exposed.

A second approach to the problem is to evaluate the account on internal evidence, what it says and how it says it. The more closely a story fits what some group of readers want to believe, the more skeptical you should be — sometimes support for your views, or someone else’s, is too good to be true. This is particularly true if the views it supports are your own, since that is when you are most inclined to believe it even on weak evidence.

The more confident a story is, the less the author qualifies his account, the less you should trust him. Sometimes you can check an account against facts you are reasonably sure of, as in the case of comparing the second account with the video. Sometimes you can spot internal inconsistencies.

Confirmation Bias Online

The only reason to view the Scottish case as evidence of sexual harassment of British girls by immigrants covered up by the police is the belief that immigrant men sexually harass British girls and the police cover it up. Someone who believes that and interprets the incident accordingly then interprets the incident as evidence for the belief. He is treating as evidence for his priors a “fact” deduced from his priors.

The example of this pattern that first struck me was in a thread in the New York primary election that Mamdani won. A poster reported that he had heard on PBS that turnout was unusually high. Another poster responded with a quote from National Review claiming that the turnout was unusually low. The first poster’s response was that that should teach him not to believe PBS — although neither poster had offered any evidence of which claim was true. His response, pretty clearly, was based on his belief that left wing sources could not be trusted, right wing sources could, and he was treating the exchange as evidence for that belief. Someone with the opposite bias who saw the National Review claim first and was then pointed at the PBS story would have interpreted the conflict as evidence that right wing sources such as National Review should not be trusted, left wing sources such as PBS should be.

Which helps explain how there can be many people confident of X, many people confident of not-X, both groups confident that their belief is supported by the evidence.

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1. The link is to a copy of the story posted on X by someone else.

2. Past posts on the problem of Discovering Truth.

3. Unlikely but not impossible if it is a good enough story, appeals to a substantial ideological faction, or both.