This morning I saw something that surprised me.

There's an account I follow on Twitter, that of the independent journalist Jack Posobiec, and he posted something that, quite frankly, I think is probably going to be taken down soon.

He made this tweet.

Which is retweeting this tweet.

The impression I got from this right away is that this was some sort of staged event where people were faking being dead in order to push a political narrative.

You're given the impression that this is something the Palestinians did to give the appearance of martyrdom to gain sympathy, but one guy blew it by scratching his nose and proving that the whole thing is fake.

Given the time of this posting, we are also supposed to believe this has to do with the recent violence at the Israeli border.

GAZA-ISRAEL BORDER (Reuters) - Palestinians buried the dead on Tuesday from the bloodiest day in Gaza in years, after Israeli forces killed 60 Palestinians near the Gaza-Israel border during demonstrations against the opening of the U.S. embassy in Jerusalem.

Israeli forces kill two Palestinians near border as Gaza buries dead

However, what is the reality?

That narrative is not true...

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This video is not an event that is supposed to feature actual dead bodies. And it's not recent.

It is an Egyptian student protest from 2013.

This is why context matters

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It should be obvious from this example that context is very important.

It's possible that p4e, the account that posted the original video, was intending to make a broader statement about the ease with which fake news can be created, but he gives not indication of that.

Instead, it appears that he was in fact intending for people to misconstrue this video as recent and also featuring actual bodies, and even being a product of Palestine or Hamas.

It's not like we shouldn't question the cases of "Wag the Dog".

If you're not familiar with that term it comes from a movie called Wag the Dog that's about how media can be used to manipulate public attention and perception. It was waaaaay ahead of its time (1997) and should be looked at as a classic.

It starts with this idiom:

Why does the dog wag its tail?
Because a dog is smarter than its tail.
If the tail were smarter, it would wag the dog.

Here's a humorous but frightening clip where a completely fabricated event is produced and played off as real, creating the perception of a war which doesn't exist in order to distract the public from a scandal during an election.

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Obviously, there are elements of this that make us think of any number of real-life events over the last decade that were staged or manipulated in order to push a particular narrative.

This demonstrates why context maters so much.

Count Dankula, again.

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I bring up Dankula and his recent case where he was found guilty of a hate crime for posting a joke video, but I think it helps to bring the point home yet again for anyone who was on the fence.

If you aren't familiar, the YouTube creator Count Dankula made a video a few years ago where he outlines right at the beginning that the whole video is intended as a joke to annoy his girlfriend. What he does is he teaches his girlfriends pug, which he says she thinks is the most adorable thing in the world, and he teaches it to act like a Nazi, which he describes as "the least adorable thing I could think of".

So it has nothing to do with Nazi's per se: it has more to do with this guy trying to annoy his girlfriend by teaching her adored dog to act like a despicable Nazi.

He lays out the context plain as day right at the start of the video, and it's fine if you find the joke itself tasteless, as I do, but that doesn't remove the fact of the context of the video, that it's a joke.

However, the Scottish government arrested him:

A YouTube star called Count Dankula could spend a year in prison if he's found guilty of a hate crime, after a video he posted was deemed anti-Semitic and saw him arrested by police.

YouTuber Count Dankula could face year in jail for Nazi dog video

And he was recently convicted of hate crime by the Scottish courts:

"You deliberately chose the Holocaust as the theme of the video,” [the judge] told the court.

"You purposely used the command 'gas the Jews' as the centrepiece of what you called the entire joke, surrounding the 'gas the Jews' centrepiece with Nazi imagery and the ‘seig heil’ command so there could be no doubt what historical events you were referring to."

Man who taught girlfriend's pet pug dog to perform Nazi salutes fined £800

I hope the example I gave earlier illustrated how easy it is to take something out of context and make it mean something else.

The problem with this is that the State gives itself the authority to declare what the context is of an event they don't like, after the fact.

They are saying that, legally, context doesn't matter because the State doesn't like the content of the speech.

In this clip a reporter confronts Dankula after sentencing in his case. It's hilarious because the reporter thinks he's setting up a hit on Dankula when the opposite is actually true. Dankula gets the reporter to describe what it is that he's been convicted of, and the reporter says "Gas the Jews" and "seig heil" several times. Then when the reporter states that the context didn't matter and he broke the law because he said the phrases, Dankula responds with "You just broke the law, too. You said the phrase, remember? Context matters, mate." And walks off like a boss leaving the reporter dumbfounded.

What do you think?

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We're getting into a social climate where words have more impact than they ever have before.

People are not sure what to do with this outpouring of opportunity of expression and the ease with which people can accumulate and utilize a platform to reach people.

Be prepared for more of this sort of thing, as "Fake News" is the catchphrase of our time.

Follow me @shayne