Deez Nuts was trending on Twitter on August 19th after poll showed him with 9% support against frontrunners Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump. If you think this is hard to believe, you’re not alone:
So is it true?
View the story on TwitterTrails
Yes. A candidate named “Deez Nuts” is running for president, and the poll where he received 9% against Hillary and Trump is real.
Deez Nuts’ candidacy can be found on the FEC website, running as an independent from Iowa. But the fact that he’s running isn’t what’s impressive (there are many fake candidates running, including a cat). The poll that showed him with 9% support was being spread by many prominent and trusted websites, the top ten of which can be seen on TwitterTrails:
This information can also be verified fairly easily with the organization who took the poll. On August 19th, 2015, Public Policy Polling released polling data which included the following question (specific to NC):
If the candidates for President next year were Democrat Hillary Clinton, Republican Donald Trump, and independent Deez Nuts who would you vote for?
And yes, Deez Nuts polled 9%, an impressive number for an independent candidate.
So, is Deez Nuts really one of the most viable independent candidates in years? Not really. It was revealed, fairly concurrently with the polling data, that Deez Nuts is actually a 15 year old, and therefore ineligible to be president. No, the form to submit your candidacy for president does not ask for your age.
Although this claim is factually true, it could be considered misleading without the knowledge that “Deez Nuts” is a 15 year old (this fact did circulate quickly after the initial headlines). So, why did it spread so much—rating “high” (128) on our TwitterTrails scale—if false information tends to have low impact on Twitter.
Of course, it’s not actually false. But more compelling than its truthiness is its humor. We have found when a claim evokes a strong emotion (in this case, humor, but other emotional reactions include fear and anger), people are more likely to spread it without questioning whether it is true. In the case of Deez Nuts’ sudden emergence as a “viable” 2016 candidate, people might not have cared whether they believed it, but were more interested in giving their followers a laugh. Similarly humorous and uplifting cases include the claim that author John Green is the Zodiac Killer and the claim that The Pope said dogs do, in fact, go to heaven.
However, this trend tends to be more worrying in crisis situations: natural disasters, shootings, or plane crashes. Worry can overpower judgement, and the idea that it is better to spread information just in case it is true or it can help and inform people can take hold.
Stay tuned for more analysis about these kinds of emotional claims…