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Previously on Fact Checking the 2024 Election, I talked about how JD Vance did not in fact make sweet love to a sofa but it doesn’t really matter because it’s just a shitpost and we’re allowed to enjoy things every now and again.
Today on Fact Checking the 2024 Election, I’d like to talk about how Republicans are not in fact carrying around jars of JD Vance’s semen and it does kind of matter because you should at least know when you’re being lied to.
Last week I went camping on an island with no cell service and no ability to contact the outside world, and my friends and I joked about how as far as we knew, World War III had officially started and we’d have no idea.
When I got back I realized that that hadn’t happened, but what had happened was much more baffling: people on social media kept saying they were “demure,” and separately they were laughing at pictures of MAGA republicans walking around holding jizz cups with labels featuring JD Vance’s face and the words “JD Vance Full Family Kit.”
I first saw this cross my feed on Xitter, where some people I follow retweeted Alejandra Caraballo, who says she’s a Clinical Instructor at Harvard Law Cyberlaw Clinic, wrote “Babe wake up, MAGA is carrying around JD Vance jizz cups.” and included six photos appearing to show just that.
I’ll be honest, upon seeing that I shook my head and believed it. I didn’t boost it with a retweet or a like, but I absolutely 100% believed it. It was only a few months ago that Trump supporters were showing their love for the fascist wannabe dictator by wearing diapers, due to rumors that Trump wears diapers because he occasionally shits himself. As you do. Also Michael Cohen referred to Trump as Von ShitzinPantz, which was officially entered into the court record.
There were many photos of them from several different rallies, taken by several different photographers, so this was undoubtedly true. I mean, it was true that MAGA supporters were wearing diapers, not that Trump definitely wears diapers. I truly hope to never see actual evidence of the latter.
If this crowd is eager to reclaim adult diapers, it’s absolutely plausible that they’d be proud to carry around jizz cups.
However, I eventually stumbled across a thread by Elise Thomas, analyst at the anti-hate organization Institute for Strategic Dialogue and investigator for the anti-disinformation organization Centre for Information Resilience. Thomas sought out the earliest post featuring the Vance jizz cups, and found an account with a suspiciously AI-looking profile pic who IMMEDIATELY posted 100 pro-Demorat tweets before posting the Vance jizz cups, without including any source or additional information about where the pics were taken.
Thomas was unable to find any independent corroboration of the story, with no one stepping forward to say they took the photos, or witnessed the jizz cups in person. All the many mainstream news articles about this simply repeat the original poster’s claim and photos.
I found her thread compelling, but I noticed that the account she tracked down only posted a few of the photos that ended up going viral. So I tried to track down the origin of the other pics, and I ran into a really disturbing problem: I couldn’t do it.
A good decade ago I regularly gave a talk about identifying misinformation online. In that lecture I provided resources that would help the average person understand whether a Tweet was being artificially boosted by bots, whether a video contained accurate sound, and whether a photo had been digitally altered or had a different origin than someone claimed. All of those things are still relevant concerns today. I expected technology to change, for fakes to get harder to detect but also for bullshit detection tools to get better, but I didn’t anticipate what actually seems to have happened: fakes are now harder to detect and the bullshit detection tools have simply disappeared.
For instance, Tineye was an early reverse image search that made it very easy to see the earliest date when an image was posted somewhere on the internet. Unfortunately, these days most things are first posted not to personal websites but to social media, and most social media sites, like Facebook and Instagram, have blocked Tineye from crawling them.
Google introduced a reverse image search that DID include social media posts, and in fact it gave you a lot more control over what dates to search and what websites to focus on. So that’s where I went to see when these photos were first posted to Xitter, only to realize that back in 2022 Google replaced it’s reverse image search with a useless “AI” powered product called Google Lens, which does not allow you to do any of that. Searching those photos simply brought up all the articles that were reposting the original Tweets, with no way to filter. You can’t even organize the results by date. It’s completely useless.
I should mention that Yandex is another reverse image search that used to be good but it just doesn’t load for me anymore. That might be due to my firewall.
Similarly, Thomas pointed out that she put the photos through tools meant to detect AI and they were inconclusive. A number of those tools don’t even work on images posted on social media thanks to the lower resolution. Social media platforms also strip images of their metadata, which could otherwise show you where and when a photo was taken, including even what camera was used. That’s probably a good thing because of privacy concerns, but it’s one more tool that’s now missing from the bullshit detection kit.
That, to me, is the real problem with this story. Honestly, yeah, I don’t really care whether or not Trump fans are walking around with JD Vance jizz cups. It’s not a shitpost, per se, like the JD Vance couch fucking story, but it’s fairly low stakes misinformation. The trouble is that this exact same series of events could easily apply to higher stakes misinformation: someone comes up with a lie, artificially boosts it on Xitter, and the mainstream media then republishes it with zero fact-checking. And the billionaires who now run the internet have decided that we average people no longer deserve access to the tools to investigate it ourselves.
I should say that it’s not that the media is doing no fact checking. To their credit, they “debunked” the Vance couch fucking shitpost, which everyone with a double digit or higher IQ already knew was a shitpost. And here’s how they fact checked the rampant disinformation spread by Democrats at their convention this week:
When Hilary Clinton said that Kamala Harris “won’t be sending love letters to dictators,” the Washington Post wrote that there’s no evidence Trump sent such letters. Oh except for the fact that Trump literally Tweeted one of the letters he wrote, described them as “love letters” himself, and showed 27 of the letters to Bob Woodward. You know, the guy who broke the Watergate story? In the Washington Post?
Here’s another fun Washington Post fact check: “No, every Trump budget did not seek to cut Social Security and Medicare.” Wow, the Democrats lied about that? I wonder where they got that horrible bit of misinformation from. Let me just glance a few inches down….ah, “Harris-Walz campaign spokesperson Joseph Costello defended the tweet’s phrasing, citing a Washington Post report published during the GOP primary campaign that said each of Trump’s White house budget proposals “included cuts to Social Security and Medicare programs.”
Did…did the Washington Post just debunk their own headline? Fascinating. Thanks, guys. Really crucial fact checking there.
So yeah, this is what the jizz cup story lays bare: the mainstream media is failing us. At a time when misinformation is getting harder to detect but the stakes are so high that the US may not be a democracy next year, our largest and most respected journalists are pretending they don’t know what words mean anymore so they can nitpick true statements to death. Even Snopes, that former bastion of misinformation busting, got in on the action with a ridiculous “fact check” claiming that Trump never called white supremacists “very fine people.” Some idiot repeated this lie in a comment on a recent video, so it’s definitely spreading. Let’s be clear: it’s a lie. Trump said there were “very fine people” on “both sides” of the Unite the Right rally, which even Snopes now admits was “conceived of, led by and attended by white supremacists.” No one on the white supremacist side of the rally was not a white supremacist. Therefore, BY DEFINITION, Trump called white supremacists “very fine people.”
But no, even our former heroes at Snopes have taken the tack of muddying the truth and helping misinformation spread. And not just any misinformation, but misinformation that directly benefits a bigoted fascist who is currently trying to overthrow democracy. Cool.
Anyway, let’s circle back to the jizz cups. Do I now think MAGAts came up with this stupid idea of proudly displaying cups of JD Vance’s semen at their rallies? Not really. Do I think these photos are real? Yeah, I do. My hypothesis is that someone went to a rally pretending to be MAGA and had these morons pose with the jizz cup they made. Footage will probably show up on some comedian’s prank YouTube channel at some point. And the Washington Post will run a fact check about how Trump and Vance aren’t going to outlaw abortion because one time they pinky promised that they wouldn’t.
