Subtitle: Why do so many Moldovans think Obama is a socialist?*
Subsubtitle: A call for responsible cross-cultural Facebook sharing

- A collaborative post by Victoria Vlad and Josh Boissevain

* Disclaimer: this post is not meant to support any party, it is mostly about cross cultural misunderstandings and how one thing can mean something completely different in another culture.

We start with a true story:

A sociology professor at a local college recently made a statement in class that Facebook posters are the most gullible population in the whole world. The students didn’t believe him and said that most Internet users are responsible and thoughtful individuals. The class insisted many FB users even have their own blogs which are well written and intelligent.

The professor then said, “OK, we will have an experiment in this class to see how easy it would be to trick Facebook users”. The next day, he told his class that the experiment would be like this: He would make a test for the entire Facebook community. He would come up with the most unbelievable claim he could imagine (Obama is a socialist), invent a story about  another university professor doing an experiment in his class to prove this crazy idea. And then, at the end he would write five random sentences that only seem reasonable if you don’t know anything about reality. The people who blindly re-posted this hoax would get an F, and so would the students in the class.

Much to the professor’s expectations (and the student’s horrors), this phony story was re-posted and liked on Facebook thousands and thousands of times. Then the post eventually made its way to the tiny country of Moldova, where the youth are known for their thoughtful use of social media and involvement in enlightened political debate across their blogosphere. The students expected Moldovan youth to stop the rumor in its tracks by fact-checking and always questioning a piece of information’s source. Unfortunately, one-by-one, Moldovan posters started sharing the professor’s experiment about Obama being a socialist. Even when they were given proof the story was a hoax, many continued to share it on their timeline saying that the philosophy was still ‘frumos’.

To the student’s surprise, THEY ALL FAILED the class. The End

OK, so the above story is not actually true. We just made it up to prove a point. Please don’t share it on Facebook as true. We don’t want to make any more hoaxes go viral.

Why would we do this?

If there is one thing we know, it is that not everything that you see is to be believed, not everything that you hear is to be repeated. And more recently, not everything you read on Facebook is to be shared.

Everybody knows those moments when things just go viral on the Internet, or in your News Feed. Our Facebook News Feed got flooded yesterday night with many friends sharing this image. Maybe you’ve seen it.  Maybe you’ve even re-posted it.

It came with a story about socialism and grades, and everybody rushed to share it, as it clearly stated that socialism is bad. Our Facebook friends commented that the story was “very good,”  “very true.” After a read, Victoria was surprised to see the purpose of the story was meant to criticize the US president’s so called: “socialism.” This story generated hundreds of comments. This is the story: (Read it with caution, if you dare).

Seeing this post at first was surprising to both of us. Why were so many Moldovans all of the sudden calling Obama a socialist? Did they all recently become super excited about America’s upcoming election? Were they wanting to support the Republican party and the Tea Party movement?

It just didn’t make sense.

Also, the story itself seemed kind of silly, like it was propaganda written by someone who didn’t really understand politics, economics or even grammar. As more and more of our friends and fellow bloggers started to share this post on Facebook, we became more and more worried. Josh did some research and discovered that, sure enough, the story was fake. In fact, the story itself had existed longer than Obama has been president. The site Snopes (which is famous for debunking myths and rumors) wrote extensively about the so-called professor and his socialism grade experiment. Please read it, it’s very interesting.

Most of our friends who shared it didn’t give the story a second thought. However, as the post was meant to criticise Obama, Victoria couldn’t stand it, especially with Obama’s speech at the State of the Union coming up. Josh was upset because so many people were spreading a rumor that seemed so obvious to be phony. So we started posting the link to the Snopes site to everyone who shared the original post to show that it was fake. Moldova friends explained it was about the grades example, and not about Obama.

OK

This made Victoria feel a little better to learn that her friends weren’t trying to spread lies and outrageously untrue accusations at a foreign president. But then Angela published a blog entry , where she quoted the end of the post about grades and socialism:

“These are possibly the 5 best sentences you’ll ever read and all applicable to this experiment:
1. You cannot legislate the poor into prosperity by legislating the wealthy out of prosperity.
2. What one person receives without working for, another person must work for without receiving.
3. The government cannot give to anybody anything that the government does not first take from somebody else.
4. You cannot multiply wealth by dividing it!
5. When half of the people get the idea that they do not have to work because the other half is going to take care of them, and when the other half gets the idea that it does no good to work because somebody else is going to get what they work for, that is the beginning of the end of any nation.”

This made Victoria and Josh kind of worried again, because these five sentences were definitely NOT the best we will ever read.

(If you want to know the truth, the best five sentences you’ll ever read are actually written by Shakespeare, Eminescu, The Beatles, and one each from Victoria and Josh, which they haven’t written yet, but will soon.)

Not only are these statements not the best we’ve ever read, far from it, they are all wrong. They are all gross simplifications of an extreme right-wing American economic philosophy that bears no relation to the real world.

We can agree Angela is right about Socialism–it’s not good and it was proven not to work in the past.

But before we can go any further, we need to take a brief second to inject a bit of sociocultural linguistics. When two cultures use the same word, they don’t always mean the same thing. There tends to be layers and layers each culture encoded in the word, even if both cultures are using the same language. And this is what’s happening here with the word socialism. For Americans, this word means something different than it does for Moldovans. Yes, we can look and agree on the same dictionary definition. But a word’s power goes beyond that. It includes years of historical significance, cultural conditioning and political subtext that no dictionary could begin to define. And this is what happens with the word ‘Socialism’. For Moldovans, this words is uniquely tied to their Soviet history. It conjures images of kolkhozes and gulags. For Americans, it has a much, much different connotation that is heavily influenced by the Red Scare and the anti-communist McCarthy hearings in the 1950s. For Americans, the word is much more political than it is historical. Today, in American’s Republican vs Democrat political climate, the word ‘Socialist’ it’s mainly used as a negative code word for someone who is liberal. It is usually (and unfortunately) divorced from its actual historical sense. It is an example of dirty (and lazy) American politics and name calling, from which neither party is exempt. The same thing happens between parties in every country (and Moldova is no different).

But what bothered us most about the Facebook post and the grade experiment sharing was how many times it was reposted and referenced in Moldova without respect or reference to its American origins and, thus, its cultural baggage. Josh is an American and Victoria is a Moldovan living in America, so we are both conscious of American cultural trends. People just reposted the story because it reminded them of problems with the Moldovan educational and grading systems (or maybe of the Soviet period), but they didn’t stop to think what questions this might raise for non-Moldovans seeing them post it.

Josh kept asking himself what would his American friends think of Moldova if they saw his News Feed filled with this post from his Moldovan friends and colleagues. They would want to know, why are all these Moldovans (who were for the most part progressive in their politics) becoming supporters of the pretty crazy Tea Party. Victoria, on the other hand, was convinced many took it to mean Obama is a socialist, a proponent of Soviet socialism without private property. Too much was getting lost in translation.

For an example of how this process happened the other way, a funny story happened to Josh. Josh, for those who don’t know him, was a journalist and teacher who lived in Moldova for many years (Now he’s in Romania). He didn’t really follow Moldovan politics, and he didn’t have an opinion about which party was best, or who should be president or mayor. But he does like Moldovan music and culture. One day he saw a catchy song on Youtube called “Iubesc Moldova”, he didn’t know anything about it at first or who made it other than it was a funny, catchy and positive song that featured a pretty girl singing. What’s not to like? But then Josh posted the video on his Facebook page to share with his American friends. Well it turns out this video was part of the Communist election campaign. When Josh posted it, some people began messaging him asking why he was a Communist. Josh was surprised to learn the origin of the video and immediately took it down because he didn’t want to seem as if he promoted a party for an election he couldn’t vote in in a country where he wasn’t a citizen. That would be rude and un-guest-like. From then on, Josh decided to always be more aware of the underlying cultural/political messages hidden by seemingly ‘cool’ posts on Facebook. Now that is a true story!

OK enough about Obama and linguistics.

In the hundreds of comments made on all the different posts, most people said they weren’t anti-Obama or they didn’t want to talk about American politics. They only posted or shared because they ‘liked the story’ and because it was a good argument about socialism.

But you know what? It’s not a good argument against socialism. How could it be, it never happened! You can’t use a made-up story to prove that a theory is true or false. Just like you can’t use fake evidence to prove somebody is guilty.

If you want to debate the merits of socialism vs capitalism, that’s great. But to do that, you have to use real arguments and real examples to make your point.

Otherwise, it’s just poor logic!