A Hoax Culture

This is not a rape culture.
This is not a racist culture.
This is not a murderous culture.

This is a hoax culture.

The stories come because they are plausible, at least to those still plugged into the media. When your sense of plausibility is distorted by FOX news, CNN, or whatever your friends are posting on Facebook, you are the target audience.

These are atrocity hoaxes designed, like all atrocity stories (whether true or not), to elicit violence against whomever supposedly perpetrated the atrocity.

Rape hoaxes encourage violence against men.

Racist hoaxes are meant to create violence between the races.

Threat hoaxes are meant to increase popular sentiment for war.

If you take it down to the family level, maybe you can get what I am saying. Parents need to temper their responses to stories in such a way as to ensure their children can survive. Atrocity stories are often designed with the hope that you won't do that- that you will send your children to murder the evil so-and-so, with no regard for future generations or even what happens the next day.