Bearing False Witness and The Bubble Reputation

This is a Leonberger blog but sometimes I post about books that are not about Leonbergers but that are books that I want to promote. This is a book I would like to promote. Last week I read The Bubble Reputation, Kindle Edition by Alex Craigie. I loved this book and therefore I would like to promote it. It comes in a paperback edition and a Kindle edition.

  • Paperback – October 12, 2022, publisher : Ashford Carbonell Publishing, ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0995696640 ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0995696648, 134 pages, Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 7.7 ounces, Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 6 x 0.31 x 9 inches, it is currently $4.38 on Amazon. Click here to order it from Amazon.com.
  • Kindle – October 11, 2022, Ashford Carbonell Publishing, ASIN B0BHZL8J9G, 147 pages. It is currently $2.99 on Amazon.com. Click here to order it from Amazon.com.
Front cover of the Bubble Reputation a novella by Alex Craigie. It is dark blue with a bubble soon to be popped by a needle. Inside the bubble is a woman in red.
False claims and rumors can destroy your good reputation in instant, like a bubble popping. Click on the image to go to the amazon page for the book.

Today, just 10 minutes before I started working on this post, I came across a great and allegedly true story on Facebook. It was touching, infuriating, and engaging, but having developed a nose for fake stories on social media I suspected it might not be true. I looked in the comment section. People were touched, excited and infuriated by the story, and no one questioned the story except one person who stated that it was a fake story. I checked out the story and indeed, it was just another fake story debunked by snopes.com and by Stanford University, and it also contradicted what Wikipedia had written about the same incident. What I would like to point out is that almost everyone fell for it instantly. Almost everyone forgot to ask the simple basic question, is it true?

The incident I am hinting at in my review below was when a friend of mine shared a story on Facebook that could be defamatory of Syrian refugees. The source claimed that mainstream media did not want to tell the story, which is why it was not well known. I have learned that such claims are a red flag, so I checked it out. Snopes.com debunked it stating that it was false. The only source carrying the story was a site that intentionally creates and disseminates fake news and stories, and there were no records of the people in the story even existing. So, I left a helpful comment explaining that sorry, but it turns out that this is a fake story and provided a link to Snopes.com. My friend deleted my comment. I was the only one questioning the story and I got no support from anyone. I asked why he did that. He was angry with me for posting the comment and he told me I could be al-Qaeda’s lawyer, which had nothing to do with the story. After I tried posting it a second time and explaining that this was “bearing false witness” intentionally using religious language I hoped would work with him, he blocked me. Later on, he sent me a friend request which I briefly accepted. However, I soon blocked him after seeing that he had not learned his lesson. We are no longer friends.

Social media is full of fake stories, ill-intentioned trolls, conspiracy theorists, Qanon BS, defamatory fake news about actors and other celebrities, and people eat it up way too easily. That is a big problem. I believe I have noticed that it is especially my demography, white men of the age 50+ that keeps falling the most for fake news and stories. I read a study that confirmed what I believe I am seeing; my demography is the worst in this regard. I think it has a lot to do with a lack of social media savviness and a tendency to believe what you want to believe. Your existing beliefs and your gut feelings are your worst enemy in this regard. I believe a science background can really help you with this. In Science you learn to focus on the evidence.

What I wanted to say with all this, is that we may always have had this problem, but it has been amplified through social media and internet and don’t think for a minute that the gullibility and crazy behavior of people in this novella is in any way unrealistic or exaggerated. I also want to highlight how big of a problem this is. False news and conspiracy theories has resulted in genocide. Why do we have to believe what we want to believe rather than what is most likely true? Why can’t we be more rational? This is an incredibly important topic. Anyway, enough of my rant, now to the book.

The Bubble Reputation from the Amazon Page

If you want to destroy someone’s reputation, social media provides the perfect tool.

Emmie Hobson, children’s author and TV presenter, is riding high on a wave of popularity when an unscrupulous newspaper editor, desperate for a scoop, brings Emmie’s world crashing down.

Social media picks up the baton and a terrifying backlash of hate and abuse is unleashed. Threats are made and there are those, inflamed by the rhetoric, prepared to take the law into their own hands.

My Amazon Review of The Bubble Reputation

Bearing False Witness

Emmie Hobson is a popular children’s books author and TV personality. She is happily married, has a great relationship with her parents, and a rocky relationship with her sister who is an addict. One day an editor for a gossip magazine decide to slander Emmie in an attempt to boost sales. She fabricates evidence to support her false accusations. Despite the evidence being questionable a lot of people are quick to believe it and social media is used to supercharge and spread the false accusations even further, while inventing new rumors. People eat it up and suddenly Emelie is a hated pariah and a target for emotional and physical abuse.

I think this book is an important wakeup call for all of us because it highlights a very dark side of humanity that has grown worse. Gossipers, rumor mongers, conspiracy theorists, and mean trolls are tremendously successful today, thanks to social media, internet and divisions in society. “Bearing false witness” is a special kind of black lie that can kill. Defamatory conspiracy theories enabled the holocaust, the Tutsi genocide and the recent genocide in Myanmar. This is a very serious topic.

I found the apparent extreme gullibility of the public in this story to be very believable, perhaps even an understatement, because of what I’ve seen on social media. For example, someone posted a false defamatory story on Facebook, and I responded with a comment debunking it. My comment included a link to snopes stating that the story was false, I pointed out that the only source for the story was a fake news creation website, and that the story had other plausibility issues. Despite all that, all other commentors on the story believed it and the person posting it launched a silly ad hominem attack against me instead of arguing the case. Social media is indeed wild.

I can add that I don’t think it is as much gullibility as a desire to believe ill about others that is rooted in envy, politics, worldviews, bias, plain meanness, or perhaps a desire to be judgmental or feel superior. Accepting unsubstantiated claims whilst being very skeptical of what you don’t want to believe, isn’t skepticism but the opposite of it. We need to do better, use common sense, and examine the evidence. The story about Emmie, despite being fiction, makes it very clear as to why.

This is one of the most intense thrillers I’ve ever read, and it is very timely. The author is describing a very believable scenario that grows more and more intense and darker and darker. Many of the characters in the book are infuriating and yet so average, so unethical and foolish, yet so sure of their righteousness, so incredible yet so realistic. The author also describes the love between Emmie and her parents, and her husband, and their unyielding support for each other throughout all this craziness. The book asks us to be careful about what we believe and to stand up against rumors and lies. It is a gripping page turner that will shake you to your core while asking you to think. It describes a slice of a drama that we are all part of everyday. I highly recommend this excellent thriller.

About the Author

Alex Craigie is the pen name of Trish Power.

Trish was ten when her first play was performed at school. It was in rhyming couplets and written in pencil in a book with imperial weights and measures printed on the back.

When her children were young, she wrote short stories for magazines before returning to the teaching job that she loved.

Trish has had three books published under the pen name of Alex Craigie. The first two books cross genre boundaries and feature elements of romance, thriller and suspense against a backdrop of social issues. Someone Close to Home highlights the problems affecting care homes while Acts of Convenience has issues concerning the health service at its heart. Her third book. Means to Deceive, is a psychological thriller.

Someone Close to Home has won a Chill with a Book award and a Chill with the Book of the Month award. In 2019 it was one of the top ten bestsellers in its category on Amazon.

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Author: thomasstigwikman

My name is Thomas Wikman. I am a software/robotics engineer with a background in physics. I am currently retired. I took early retirement. I am a dog lover, and especially a Leonberger lover, a home brewer, craft beer enthusiast, I’m learning French, and I am an avid reader. I live in Dallas, Texas, but I am originally from Sweden. I am married to Claudia, and we have three children. I have two blogs. The first feature the crazy adventures of our Leonberger Le Bronco von der Löwenhöhle as well as information on Leonbergers. The second blog, superfactful, feature information and facts I think are very interesting. With this blog I would like to create a list of facts that are accepted as true among the experts of the field and yet disputed amongst the public or highly surprising. These facts are special and in lieu of a better word I call them super-facts.

65 thoughts on “Bearing False Witness and The Bubble Reputation”

  3. I’ve also read The Bubble Reputation. How close we all are to having our legitimate reputations ruined by social media! It was a thought-provoking book. I think your experience of having your comment deleted (when you mentioned Snopes and the opposing viewpoint) is all too common regarding all sorts of topics.

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    1. Yes, exactly and I see terrible claims and rumors about certain celebrities on social media every day, even though those rumors have been debunked. It really could happen to anyone. Social media has become such a terrible tool for rumor mongers.

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    2. Thank you so much for reading my book, Vera, and for your lovely comment. ‘Fake’ news is quite terrifying, but I think it attracts more comments and therefore more publicity which, in turn, generates more money. I have to hope that it’s a silent majority out there who aren’t sucked in to the hype.

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    2. Thank you Alex. I switched from twenty twenty to twenty sixteen because I wanted a sidebar. One problem/bug in twenty sixteen is that the pictures frequently do not line up. Some are centered as they should and some are stretching all the way left. A Happiness Engineer told me that it is a bug that they are working on. If they never fix it, I will experiment with other themes that have sidebars.

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      1. One wonders if WordPress needs to hire more software engineers and web site designers or an exterminator to work on those bugs.

        Fun fact: I know that computer issues are called “bugs” because back when the first huge analog computers that worked with vacuum tubes were built in the 1940s (mostly for government work related to WWII), insects – real bugs – would get in the machinery and cause problems with the wiring or the vacuum tubes, thus messing up the systems.

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    3. Yes that is a good story. I learned about it while taking computer classes back in high school a long time ago. How things have changed since then. I can add that at my job I was “bug” hunting for a while and I identified and corrected at least 20,000 potential and real (well real in code) bugs. What I mean by potential bugs is code that could have theoretically given us problems but had not caused any known problems yet (that was most of them). I guess you just call that bad code. I also found one twenty year old bug (real bug code-weise) in a C++ program/system (worth many millions of dollars) that was causing some very strange behavior that no one had been able to figure out for years. I am a bit proud of that one because it was several hundreds of thousands of lines of code in the system and the behavior was truly weird and random and very difficult to debug, and it only happened on some computers and not others with no common factor (OS, RAM size, did not matter, some computers just got cursed). Twenty years later I saw the problem.

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    2. Yes you are right Alex. Some in the modern more authoritarian brand of conservatism aren’t particularly rational and they are not interested in the truth. They hate fact checking and research. The same people also tend to dislike science. They are not honest people.

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  6. Hi Thomas, fake news is a really big problem and I’ve found that many people who make a lot of noise about how terrible fake news is, are the very ones who spread it and don’t question things. I always check facts and for my historical books I use 30 sources on average. I also enjoyed the Bubble Reputation which I finished very recently and have yet to write a review for (I have a backlog of 5 reviews to write – eek!). I was a scary book to read, because it is so possible and people are so capable of being deceitful and underhanded for personal gain.

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    1. Yes I agree with you. There is a group of people who shout about fake news while being the worst perpetrators and spreaders of it themselves. They think they know better than all the scientists in the world. They think that everything that fits their agenda is true and that which does not is fake. But as you say there are reliable sources that you can check. I am looking forward to your review of Alex Craigie’s book.

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    2. Thanks, Robbie. I know how conscientious you are – sadly, others don’t have your ethics and enjoy the thrill of a trumped-up story. It’s even worse when you learn from Thomas that you are actually penalised for revealing the honest truth. I’m really delighted that you’ve read my book and don’t worry about a review; your comment here is enough. 🙂

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        1. Robbie, I’m retired, the children all live nearby but are no longer my responsibility, I don’t have a blog and I struggle to cope with writing, reading, reviewing and keeping up with friends on social media. I know how much you have on your plate with home, work, your own writing, the fondant masterpieces, your other creative skills, your blogging, reading and reviewing. Do you ever actually sleep? ❤

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    1. Thank you so much Sally. I loved this quote ” Alex’s book as a reminder to us all that not all we see should be believed or acted upon.”It reminds me of the title of a very good non-fiction book I read, on this topic, “Don’t Believe Everything You Think”. Yes we need to verify everything before believing especially if it seems out of the ordinary. For science, we luckily have peer reviewed articles, the gold standard, hopefully many for the topic.

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    2. Thanks, Sally. It’s a sad sign of the times that we now have groups like Snopes debunking the false news out there. Some of the topics they discredit are frighteningly serious.

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  9. Thomas, thank you so much for this wonderful review. You can imagine how important it is to me. Your own experience is a terrifying reflection on a world that’s lost its way and likes to run with the herd instead of, as you say, focusing on the evidence. All the very best to you.

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    1. Thank you so much Alex for your very kind comment. Your book struck a chord with me. It was one of the best thrillers I’ve ever read and with such an important message. I read it in one day about a week ago and I could not stop even though I had other things to do. So thank you for that experience.

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  11. Pingback: Smorgasbord Blogger Spotlight 22nd September 2023 – #Techwoes Jacqui Murray, #Empathy Jennie Fitzkee, #AI #Amazon Nicholas Rossis, #Writinglife Mae Clair,#Fakenews #Review Thomas Wikman, #FriedRice #Legends Dolly Aizenman | Smorgasbord Blog Magazine

    1. Thank you, Liz. Your considered review was wonderful and I particularly appreciated your comments at the end querying whether we’ve passed a point of no return. You have to hope for some rational intervention…

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  13. Thank you for this important message. Gossipers, rumor mongers, conspiracy theorists, and mean trolls are trying to distract themselves from their own issues. But that’s no excuse. Karma will catch up with them eventually, and love wins.

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  14. Great review! The book has imitated life. It is scary what social media can do to someone’s reputation, often without proof. In terms of trolls, I have a bunch of my own which I have collected throughout the years.😂Anyway, sounds like an interesting read.

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    1. Thank you, Jennifer. Having a bunch of your own trolls, I assume you don’t mean the little cute toy trolls you put on a shelf. I am so sorry that is happening to you. It’s crazy how it has become and how some people feel entitled to harass others online. I hope your trolls will disappear.

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  15. There are many fake stories doing the rounds in social media. Character assassination is one of the main reasons. Glad you talked about this and the book you reviewed so well.

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  16. As soon as I see a meme with a comment that it’s not being widely reported, I know it’s b.s. I can’t say I’ve never made a mistake and shared something that turned out to be false, but that is a point where people choose to learn or not. Your former friend did not choose wisely when presented with that scenario.

    Also, I’m going to look this author up. Her themes sound very interesting.

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    1. Yes, you are right. There is so much obvious bunk on social media that people seem to be falling for as if they can’t think. It’s an odd piece of news/story, overuse of the words “truth” and “secret”, mainstream sources don’t report it, Wikipedia contradicts it (even though Wikipedia isn’t 100% it’s an indicator), there’s a claim stating mainstream media is hiding it (a very common con-claim), there are so many different red flags that are often ignored.

      Some people seem to be incapable of being skeptical of things that they want to believe, and they fall for any dumb nonsense because it seems to strengthen their worldview. Then when there’s something that we know to be true (or false) based on scientific evidence and scientific consensus, then suddenly they are very skeptical. They can’t look beyond their own bias even when it should be obvious. Sometimes I think we need a mandatory class on detecting bunk.

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  17. A great review of Alex’s book.
    such a dark and scary subject.
    Indeed gossip and hearsay can be such a devastatingly destructive weapon.

    I deal with children’s books and my favourite book which deals with hearsay and gossip is ‘the Prince who wrote a letter’.

    Good post and glad you stuck to you guns and challenged the gossip.

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    1. Yes you are right Sue. Gossip, rumors, false defamatory claims are incredibly dangerous and ruin lives. We have to do better in not believing everything we want to believe. I looked up the prince who wrote a letter and it looks like a good children’s book. Thank you for your kind words.

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  18. I was completely unaware of this book. Thanks for bringing it to my attention. I was especially struck by your comment; “Many of the characters in the book are infuriating and yet so average, so unethical and foolish, yet so sure of their righteousness, so incredible yet so realistic.”

    Yes. So often is the average Joes and Janes, bent just a little, causing all the destruction, because, you know, they’re right.

    Lovely review. And many kudos to the author for writing such a book.

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