You haven’t met me. How do you know I’m not a dog? Well sure, you could check to see that someone with my name is licensed to practice law in New York, but am I that guy? The New Yorker ran a famous cartoon years ago about this.
But we’re so much smarter now, so much more sophisticated that no one could get away with creating a fictional persona online. As Dan Bauman shows at the Chronicle of Higher Education, we’re still easily fooled.
Drew Cloud is everywhere. The self-described journalist who specializes in student-loan debt has been quoted in major news outlets, including The Washington Post, The Boston Globe, and CNBC, and is a fixture in the smaller, specialized blogosphere of student debt.
Not a lawyer, but he was firmly established as a niche expert.
Drew Cloud’s story was simple: He founded the website, an “independent, authoritative news outlet” covering all things student loans, “after he had difficulty finding the most recent student loan news and information all in one place.”
There was only one problem with this guy who had so much really important information to say.
He became ubiquitous on that topic. But he’s a fiction, the invention of a student-loan refinancing company.
We’re far more accepting of the expertise of a non-existent individual than we would be of a company that sells what they’re opining about.
After The Chronicle spent more than a week trying to verify Cloud’s existence, the company that owns The Student Loan Report confirmed that Cloud was fake. “Drew Cloud is a pseudonym that a diverse group of authors at Student Loan Report, LLC use to share experiences and information related to the challenges college students face with funding their education,” wrote Nate Matherson, CEO of LendEDU.
And it’s not just that he fooled readers of his blog, but journalists accepted his existence without question, until Dan Bauman.
Before that admission, however, Cloud had corresponded at length with many journalists, pitching them stories and offering email interviews, many of which were published. When The Chronicle attempted to contact him through the address last week, Cloud said he was traveling and had limited access to his account. He didn’t respond to additional inquiries.
While we obsess about Russian bots screwing with our heads, and debate whether reporters still report or manipulate, we focus on the potential negative outcomes rather than the medium. On the internet, nobody knows you’re a dog. We still don’t.
For lawyers and law, this problem is greatly exacerbated. There’s the pervasive “twitter lawyer” problem of non-lawyers regurgitating ridiculous assertions about law, which may be circulated widely, influence a great many non-lawyers and be utterly wrong. But then, what of a renowned Harvard law professor spreading the same information, deliberately using his academic office to make people stupider? He may not deserve a place in the classroom if he’s that incompetent, but he can still disseminate and dissemble online.
It’s not that the problem is new, but the attention it used to receive when the interwebs were young has been displaced by inertia. The public is given legal advice from people who claim to be lawyers, but nobody knows if that’s true. Or whether they’ve been a lawyer for 20 years or 20 minutes. We take for granted that the people we come across are who they say they, or at least exist.
When self-proclaimed expert Adrianos Facchetti wrote at Blog For Profit, run by disbarred lawyer Grant Griffiths turned marketing guru, “You are what Google says you are,” the danger was obvious. Instead of heeding the call for caution, law students and young lawyers prefer to live dangerously. But isn’t the goal of every young lawyer to become internet famous? That’s all that matters.
Drew Cloud managed to become internet famous and gain the acceptance of journalists as an expert in his field. For people drowning under the weight of student loans, his words were critically important. Who’s teaching the public the law, other than Larry Tribe?
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