Matt Basta: purveyor of fake news
A story about how I accidentally duped the Bay Area press in 2013
A quick note: this post has a bunch of tweets in it. When I started writing the post, the tweets embedded nicely. Around halfway through, the tweets stopped embedding. I’ve done my best to screenshot appropriately. Sorry for the inconvenience!
I grew up in Pennsylvania, where nothing much of anything happens1. In 2008, the first startup I worked for flew me to California for a week to meet their team after I’d spent the summer writing code for them. The following summer, they flew me out to SF for three months for an all-expenses-paid unpaid internship. These were the best summers I’d ever had by far: I was on my own (!) in a city (!) with the freedom to do pretty much whatever.
I wasn’t a bad kid. I didn’t end up drinking2 or doing drugs, or committing crime (or at least, crimes bad enough to remember). I was newly out of the closet and being in SF was exciting to say the least.
The following two summers were spent in Mountain View, living in corporate housing for (paid) internships. These were also exciting, but not living-alone-in-SF exciting. In 2012, I graduated college and moved to Mountain View to work full time.
Living in Mountain View is sort of cursed. You’re right there: SF is just a 30 minute train ride away in theory. But all your friends that actually live in the city will never come down to the south bay to hang out (“you want me to take Caltrain???”) and heading to the city is a time commitment.
Commuting back and forth by car isn’t great either. You’ll probably spend more time trying to park than you do driving, like someone I briefly dated. The relative social isolation of the peninsula creates a weird cultural bubble that most folks outside of that bubble don’t really understand.
There are certain things that you absolutely feel in your bones living on the peninsula. You spend (spent? I don’t know if it’s different now) a lot of time talking and thinking about HOV lane access. Did you take the San Mateo-Hayward bridge or the Dumbarton? Depending on the time of day, day of the week, and direction you’re traveling, it could be faster to take 280, the 101, or El Camino. Where are you going for brunch this weekend, and what time should you get there to beat the rush? Which ramen place has the best tonkatsu?
Something that resonates with many folks is the snootiness of the people in certain municipalities along the peninsula. While there’s more than a few that you could poke fun at, Atherton is the easiest. Atherton is full of wealthy folks who lack a lot of self-awareness. If there’s a gap between the middle class and the upper class, essentially all of Atherton is on the upper class side of that gap.
One Quora writer has great things to say about Atherton, but it’s clear how quintessentially disconnected they are from the reality around them:
The police department is the best, ever. If you're nervous and your husband is out of town, they'll come over with a flashlight and walk through your entire yard, just to help out. They are warm, friendly, and you can leave your key there when you go on vacation.
While I was living in the south bay, I commuted to the city quite a bit. On one Caltrain ride north, a conductor came over the PA system. To paraphrase:
Alright folks, we’re expecting a big influx of passengers at our next stop. If you’re currently located in the vestibule, I’d like you to kindly ask you to make your way to a seat so that we can make room for all of the passengers attempting to board.
[Later]
Our next stop is Atherton. Like I said before, if you’re standing in the vestibule or an aisle, please make your way to a seat so that we can ensure that everyone is able to board the train. I repeat, our next stop is Atherton.
We arrived at Atherton to a completely empty platform. Of course.
Atherton’s crown jewel is (was?) its police blotter. A screenshot of some highlights if you don’t want to click through:
Literally every single one is like this. And no, this isn’t a parody, though I think the newspaper editors may have had some fun putting these together. And so I thought, “What would a Mountain View police blotter look like?”
Basta starts a Twitter
@MVPoliceBlotter started out simple. And truthfully, it took a few days for it to find its voice.
At the start, I had a queue of tweets set to post roughly every eight hours. Quickly, I realized that the brand was not about mundane “crimes,” like the real ones in Atherton. Instead, I leaned into Mountain View’s reputation as a tech hub of the south bay.
The voice that I tried to cultivate had some rules:
None of the problems should be noteworthy enough to be in a normal police blotter.
The problems should either be issues that only techies would have.
OR, should be the sorts of problems that you might call the police for if you were a Karen (that works at Google).
The tone of the tweets should be formal and dry. It should read like a real police blotter.
The tweets almost always take the form of “[Crime] [location]. [Resolution]”. The crime is mundane (or not a crime), the location is real, and the resolution should be simple enough to make the report feel silly.
Basta makes the news
On August 1, 2013, I was slightly hungover from drinking the last of a bottle of wine that I wasn’t especially thrilled with. I added a tweet to the queue that I didn’t think was very good, but it would do to help keep the tweets coming.
https://twitter.com/MVPoliceBlotter/status/363276999420153856
The tweet was twote the following morning before I woke up. And it immediately got spicy.
It’s been nearly a decade since this incident, so I’m going to retell it as I recall it. I might get some of the facts wrong, though I’m checking them as best I can. Unfortunately, there’s no perfect snapshot of the tweet, its likes and retweets, and the stories published off of Twitter from the time.
The tweet started to pop off, and it was retweeted by a journalist for ABC7. ABC7’s main Twitter account was configured (at the time, at least) to retweet anything their journalists retweeted. My crappy hung-over joke became news.
Shortly thereafter, news stories started appearing, including one in the San Jose Business Journal (since taken down). Here’s one, updated with a correction (behind a paywall)3:
https://www.bizjournals.com/sanjose/news/2013/08/05/google-glass-claims-first-casualty-a.html
A really interesting read that analyzed the aftermath had this to say:
The obvious red flags didn’t stop lots of sites, including the San Jose Business Journal (since taken down), from grabbing the story from a flood of retweets. John Markoff of The New York Times expressed some skepticism with a tweet of his own, and @MountainViewPD, the real Twitter account of the Mountain View Police Department, put an end to the nonsense.
After the fact, some “real” stories started to appear.
I was also interviewed by the Mountain View Voice.
"I've gotten followed by a lot of (Silicon Valley) CEOs after the tweet blew up," he wrote, also noting that several local news agencies took notice of his Twitter account in the aftermath of the SVBJ report. "I think that's just hilarious."
The tweet even attracted the attention of noted science fiction writer and Google Glass enthusiast, William Gibson, who mentioned the satirical tweet and the @MVPoliceBlotter handle on his own Twitter account.
Where the account went
The MV PD wasn’t thrilled, to be honest. They asked me to make it more obvious that it was a parody account. I pointed folks to their official profile and replied to folks looking to report crimes, directing them to call 911.
Over the rest of the year, I poked fun at Mountain View City Hall and Captain (now Sheriff) Hsiung, and developed what I’d hope was a bit of a rapport.
The account slowly died. I simply couldn’t do three tweets a day, and when I stopped tweeting on a schedule, I started slipping until I was just completely out of ideas.
Towards the end, I took a lot more time trying to make the tweets clever.
![Middlefield Rd. man reports large number of unraked leaves missing from his propert. [...] Concerned citizen reports large number of unraked leaves in abandoned lot on W Middlefield Rd.](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fca9ad099-4a36-4e24-ab85-a7c4a6a980b9_1176x472.png "Middlefield Rd. man reports large number of unraked leaves missing from his propert. [...] Concerned citizen reports large number of unraked leaves in abandoned lot on W Middlefield Rd.")
At some point, I felt like the concept had run its course and abandoned the account. May it be remembered fondly!
What did I learn
Well for one, nobody checks their sources before posting things on the internet. What’s especially interesting is how many folks (at the time of writing) who retweeted the original tweet list themselves as journalists or news-adjacent professions:
A substantial number of people were in media. There were some other parody writers. Lots of bay area thought leaders (CEOs, investors). And at least as far as it’s visible now, folks that were/are in the far-right4. And a bunch of folks who are far-left as well. The tweet had a ton of appeal, because it’s funny regardless of whether you hate(d) Google Glass or loved it.
I guess it’s kind of sad in a way that people blindly believed random crap I posted online. The account is blatantly satirical and it’s obvious that a ton of folks who really should have known better didn’t take the time to do even the most basic checks before clicking the send button. Thankfully the consequences were not serious for anyone.
Thinking about where we are today, I don’t think much has changed in the last decade. “Alternative facts” and “fake news” are a much more recent phenomenon than they were then, and we all know things haven’t gotten better.
It was also really validating to see the tweets getting some love from other folks writing satire. Even now, with a fairly well-trafficked blog, I don’t get very much feedback. Getting likes from other people trying to be funny online is a nice pick-me-up.
Reading between the lines, the thing that really stuck with me is the sense of community that forms around a place, even for folks that have left. In the same way that people have loyalty to the area code or neighborhood they grew up in, people have a deep affinity for places as mundane as the suburb they worked in. Mountain View is hardly the remarkable place that stands out as a center for culture, but it has a distinct vibe that’s easy to grow fond of.
There were a lot of things that eventually drove me from the south bay to the east bay, but I look back fondly on my time in Mountain View for a lot of reasons. I think, though, that holding myself to task (for months!) to think hard about the things that are good and less good about the city gave me a lot of reasons to feel that way.
Unless you count the time two judges from the county where I grew up were convicted of sending kids to juvy in exchange for kickbacks from the jail.
The first time I drank was 2009 when I, a 19-year-old college sophomore, boarded an international flight to Italy. I had a tiny bottle of wine that I paid for with my debit card. The flight attendant laughed at me. I was that kind of kid.
Before anyone gets salty about this, the train was far from full with plenty of empty rows of seats. The conductor wasn’t disrupting anything, and the humor has stuck with me for almost a decade now.
(The story incorrectly reported an incident in which a pedestrian using Google Glass was involved in an accident. That report was based on an unverified Twitter account for the Mountain View police department. We got punk'd.)
I’m not going to Way Back Machine all these q-anon twitter profiles to see whether they were off their rockers a decade ago, sorry.