The meme posted last week to the satire page “Awesome Sh*t My Drill Sergeant Said” has been shared more than 36,000 times as of Monday afternoon.
It shows the character Arcot Ramathorn from the 2001 cult classic movie “Super Troopers” next to text suggesting that Ramathorn, played by actor Jay Chandrasekhar, was denied entry to the country. The text summarizes Ramathorn’s exploits as a fictional Vermont state trooper in the film.
The post comes at a time when people are on heightened alert for fallout from Trump’s executive order restricting travel to the United States by people from seven Muslim-majority countries and halting the country’s refugee program.
The Trump administration is currently blocked from enforcing the order after a ruling by the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals last week.
The meme comes after two widely reported incidents where Canadian Muslims said they were denied entry by U.S. Customs and Border Protection at border crossings into Vermont.
Fadwa Alaoui, of Brossard, Quebec, recently told the CBC that she was detained for hours and then turned back at the port of entry in Highgate after being questioned about her religion.
In another incident, Canadian college student Yassine Aber said he was turned away from the Derby Line point of entry after being detained for hours and interrogated about his religion and national origin.
Both are Canadians of Moroccan descent who hold Canadian passports. A spokesman for U.S. Customs and Border Protection told VTDigger in a statement that it doesn’t comment on the experiences of individuals trying to enter the country.
A sampling from the more than 4,000 comments on the “Super Troopers” meme reveal many people did not get the joke, decrying the post as “fake news.” Some construed its falsity as “liberal propaganda,” while others took offense to the meme’s suggestion that Ramathorn is “Iraqi Muslim,” noting that Chandrasekhar is of Indian heritage and was born in Illinois.
“I don’t know if it’s fake news,” said Scott Waterman, public affairs officer for the Vermont State Police. “It’s certainly not factual, and it’s certainly not something that state police are dealing with right now.”
Waterman said Monday that this is the first time he’s had to deal with anyone perceiving “Super Troopers” or its characters to be anything other than a spoof of his agency.
“We’ve answered a few questions from people concerned that there was a stray trooper that couldn’t get into the country,” Waterman said, noting the heightened concern around immigration issues in the wake of Trump’s executive order.
Professor encourages critical thinking
David Mindich, a professor of media arts and journalism at Saint Michael’s College, said he too is not convinced that the meme amounts to “fake news,” but he said people’s reactions highlight troubling trends.
“It points to the danger of the way people get news,” he said.
Mindich said he isn’t familiar with the movie and as a result didn’t get the joke. As an avid consumer of news, however, it was obvious to him that the meme was not a news report.
“The category here is putting forth a joke that people are taking seriously,” Mindich said. “It doesn’t appear like the person who posted it was trying to misinform.”
The problem, Mindich said, is that there is a subset of people who aren’t familiar with “Super Troopers” who will believe the post is factual or a deliberate attempt at misinformation. That’s because people aren’t applying critical thinking to information they find online, especially on social media platforms such as Facebook, he said.
“They don’t check to see what the source is or how credible it is,” he said.
He likened this situation to the familiar experience for many people of sharing postings from popular satirists, such as The Onion or The New Yorker’s Borowitz Report, and having a Facebook friend respond to it as a factual news report.
Mindich said it’s also incumbent on people to first make sure what they’re reading is news. Satirists, he said, also have some responsibility to make clear that what they’re sharing is humor.
In this case, the page describes itself as satire in the “about” section, but there is no warning on the actual post, which Mindich said could have helped avoid confusion.
Mindich encouraged people to seek out reputable news sources on their own. A hallmark of a trustworthy news outlet is a track record of publishing corrections when it publishes inaccurate information.
Another troubling facet of the online response to the “Super Troopers” meme is how it broke along partisan lines, with many people citing it as evidence of liberal attempts to discredit Trump with false information, Mindich said.
“Anytime you have partisans battling out the truth, what you’re missing is an honest mediator, which is typically quality journalism,” he said.
