THE WORLD IS A STAGE

THE WHISPER NETWORK: A HISTORY OF RUMORS AND THEIR SOCIAL POWER

CAROLINA ABETE

April 24, 2025

Rumors are not noise—they are navigation. They rise when certainty falters, and circulate faster than facts ever could. Part survival instinct, part social choreography, they map the world when maps fail. This is a story about how belief outpaces truth—and what happens in the space between them.

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“Falsehood flies, and the truth comes limping after it.” This metaphor is not a joke or a line from a satire. It is a statement of fact. Jonathan Swift wrote it in 1710, and it has been repeated ever since by those who understand the nature of belief. The phrase has legs because it describes a phenomenon that occurs every day, across centuries, continents, and ideologies. People prefer stories that travel quickly, and truth is always late. Truth dresses carefully, truth checks its pockets, truth goes back to find its keys. Falsehood, by contrast, leaps from the window and sprints. 

The Truth Behind the Murder of the People’s Princess

Rumors exist in the space where facts are absent. They fill the silence between the known and the unknowable. In this sense, a rumor is not merely a lie. It is a social instrument, a method of navigation. In moments of uncertainty, rumor becomes orientation. It tells us where we are, even if it does not tell us what is real.

There are moments when rumor performs a social good. It alerts. It organizes. It forces attention to a subject that has been ignored. In closed societies or under oppressive regimes, rumor may be the only mechanism by which the powerless circulate knowledge. It may not always be accurate, but it may be all that is available. A rumor can initiate inquiry, prompt investigation, provoke reform. When no official narrative accounts for injustice, rumor begins the process of naming it. It is not elegant, but it is effective. Like a fire alarm that also plays the accordion.

In the Roman Forum, rumors were political weapons. Cicero dealt in rumors just as he dealt in rhetoric. Octavian accused Mark Antony of succumbing to the mystical influence of Cleopatra, not because it was true, necessarily, but because it suited the moment. A whisper campaign could achieve what a legion could not. Even the most stable empires depend on the management of belief.

During the Black Death, rumors proliferated like the plague itself. There were stories of poisoned wells, of Jewish conspiracies, of punishments from God. These rumors were not random. They served a function, namely giving shape to chaos. In Strasbourg in 1349, two thousand Jews were burned alive based on nothing more than rumor. The city was quiet afterward. Rumor had done its job.

In Paris in the late eighteenth century, people talked. They talked about the price of bread, about the behavior of the queen, about whispers from Versailles. Marie Antoinette likely never said “Let them eat cake,” but it did not matter. The phrase fit the narrative. It encapsulated a mood. It offered clarity in a time of complexity. When the Bastille fell, it was not truth that brought it down. It was belief.

Paul is dead!

Rumors travel in advance of events. They can be predictive. In 1914, before the Great War began, there were already rumors of war. In 1939, before German tanks crossed the Polish border, there were already rumors of invasion. In the United States in 1942, there were rumors about the loyalty of Japanese citizens. The rumors won: One hundred twenty thousand Japanese Americans were sent to internment camps based on the logic of suspicion. Official statements came later.

Tamotsu Shibutani, a sociologist active in the 1960s, described rumor as improvised news. When institutions fail to provide answers, people create their own. This is not a malfunction. It is a feature. In New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina, rumors of violence and mayhem spread faster than the floodwaters. Reports of bodies piled high, snipers shooting at helicopters, vandalism, and rape made the rounds. Most of it was false, but the city believed it because it felt true. 

The King is dead, long live the King

Jean-Noël Kapferer’s 1990 book Rumors: Uses, Interpretations, and Images emphasizes that rumor is not a form of misinformation, but a social act, a process through which societies manage ambiguity and construct meaning. A rumor is never neutral. It reflects tensions and desires. It is a message from the collective unconscious.

Hannah Arendt, in her book The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951), examines the role of rumor and propaganda in the construction of mass movements. She notes that totalitarian regimes rely not on truth, but on consistency. Propaganda operates not by convincing, but by eliminating alternatives. Rumor under such systems becomes the groundwork of belief. It is easier to swallow than evidence and more satisfying than fact.

Susan Sontag’s Illness as Metaphor (1978) argues that metaphor shapes our understanding of the world more powerfully than we admit. Diseases become metaphors; so do wars, disasters, and political crises. Rumor functions through metaphor as well, by cloaking the unknown in familiar language. It provides symbols where explanations fail. The metaphor becomes the message.

Neil Postman’s Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business (1985) explores how media reshapes public discourse. In a world dominated by entertainment, information is filtered through spectacle. Rumor thrives in such a climate. It offers narrative clarity, emotional immediacy, and the illusion of insight. It conforms to the logic of the medium: fast, visual, dramatic. Truth, by contrast, often lacks these qualities. It does not wear makeup. It does not project well.

Truth is slow because it must be verified. It requires procedure. Rumor is immediate because it needs only repetition. In 2001, when the first tower fell, there were rumors about the causes even before the second plane hit. In 2020, when a virus spread across the world, there were rumors about its origin, about its cure, about who might benefit. These rumors were not idle. They shaped policy, behavior, even death.

AIDS: a classified experiment gone off-script?

The internet did not invent rumor, but it accelerated its metabolism. In the past, a rumor traveled by word of mouth, by printed pamphlet, by letter. Now it travels by algorithm. Virality is a new condition. Platforms reward engagement, not accuracy. What spreads is what sticks. A falsehood framed correctly can achieve global reach in minutes. The truth remains under review. It is still checking in at the gate.

QAnon is not simply a conspiracy theory. It is a case study in digital rumor. It began with a series of anonymous posts and grew into a belief system. It claimed that powerful figures were engaged in child sacrifice and cannibalism. Similar rumors were spread about early Christians in pagan Rome. The form is old. The content adapts. If you want to know what a population fears, listen to its rumors. Rumor is a technology of the collective unconscious. It maps fear. It assigns blame. It builds consensus where authority has failed.

Rumors have structure. They are not chaotic. They require narrative, protagonists, villains, consequences. A rumor that lacks plot will not survive. In this way, rumor mimics literature. It tells a story where none has been officially told. It comforts by creating coherence. When a plane disappears, rumor rushes to explain. When a leader falls ill, rumor constructs an ending.

Cannibals in pizza parlors

The function of rumor is explanatory. Its goal is not deception but understanding. That is why it persists even when disproven. To debunk a rumor is to attack a belief system. The believer will resist. The believer will find another explanation. The rumor will evolve and defend itself.

Rumor is not gossip. Gossip is interpersonal. It is about who slept with whom, who got fired, who drinks too much. Rumor is public, and concerns events and groups. It asks what happened, what might happen, what should be feared. Rumor spreads across networks. Gossip lives in proximity.

Rumor is also not myth, although they are related. Myth is structured. It has been formalized, ritualized, handed down. Rumor is unregulated. It lacks authorship. But both speak to the same need, namely that people require stories to survive uncertainty.

Rumor is democratic. It belongs to no one and to everyone. It arises from collective anxiety. It spreads through informal channels. It is not controlled, though it is often manipulated. States use rumor to their advantage. In wartime, rumor becomes a tool of propaganda, and in peace, it becomes a tool of surveillance.

There is no solution to rumor. Fact checking is useful but insufficient, because rumor is not a matter of information. It is a matter of psychology. It thrives on fear, on silence, on delay. The truth may arrive eventually, but it will not matter. The rumor will have already done its work.

Now, you might ask, what is the most consequential rumor that turned out to be completely false, and what is the biggest rumor that turned out to be true? While there are many examples throughout history, let us stick to the last five or so decades.

Saddam is alive and kicking in Bermuda

The most far-reaching false rumor of the twenty-first century may be the claim that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction. It was repeated on cable news, in congressional hearings, at the United Nations. It justified a war. The rumor had a story: a rogue state, a dangerous leader, secret labs. What it did not have was evidence. No weapons were found. By the time the truth emerged, the damage was irreversible—hundreds of thousands dead, a region destabilized, a new era of perpetual war. It was a case study in how a rumor, once institutionalized, becomes reality. Belief first, fact later—if at all.

The biggest rumor that turned out to be true might have been the Watergate scandal. In 1972, there was a rumor that a break-in at the Democratic National Committee headquarters was connected to President Nixon’s campaign. It sounded like paranoia. The official line was dismissive. Then, two reporters kept digging. The story unraveled slowly, clumsily, in pieces. It turned out the rumor was true. The president had lied, and the system had covered for him. The White House tapes confirmed what anonymous whispers had first suggested. In this case, rumor lit the fuse. Truth limped in eventually, carrying a resignation letter.

Nixon: Denied everything and left early

Watergate, in retrospect, appears almost quaint. The scale of deception, fabrication, and belief that characterizes more recent administrations has shifted the center of gravity. The fiction has become more ambitious. The facts are increasingly optional. We live in the era of “alternative facts” and “fake news.” Rumor has become socially acceptable and fit for polite company.

There will always be another rumor. There will always be another moment when the facts are unclear and someone begins to whisper (or shout), I heard . . . This is not a glitch. This is how societies function. Falsehood flies. Truth limps. The race is not fair, but it is inevitable.

Carolina Abete (b. 1989 in Las Vegas, Nevada) is a cultural writer raised on whispers, screenshots, and satellite delays. A millennial who learned to scroll before she could spell, she studies the emotional life of information. This is her first essay for print, though her work has already circled the globe several times without attribution.

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