Welcome to FTW Explains, a guide to catching up on and better understanding stuff going on in the world. Have you seen some posts about an Associated Press fact check on vice presidential candidate JD Vance’s couch? Are you wondering why sofas are dominating social media? Don’t worry. We’re here to help.
If you woke up this morning and saw tons of memes about JD Vance and a couch, you may very well have felt like you just fell out of a coconut tree.
Everywhere you look on social media, it seems like there’s another Vance/couch meme and, unless you’re extremely online, it’s probably all very confusing. That got even more complicated when the Associated Press tried to get to the bottom of the story (more on this in a bit).
It’s best to just start from the beginning and show how we got here. Which means answering the question that brought you here in the first place.
Did JD Vance have sex with a couch?
Ok, so it turns out this question is actually a bit more difficult to answer than it should be. I’ll explain.
On July 15, the day Donald Trump announced Vance as his running mate, X/Twitter user @rickrudescalves sent a very explicit tweet insinuating the Ohio senator’s memoir Hillbilly Elegy contains a depiction of Vance having intercourse with a couch. The allegation, however, is fictional. Nowhere in the book does that anecdote appear — and certainly not on the pages mentioned.
Shortly after the tweet, @rickrudescalves replied to himself with an Arthur meme that the terminally online will recognize as shorthand for “Just Go On the Internet and Tell Lies“, a nod to the fabrication in his original post.
So people didn’t realize the Vance couch story was a joke?
Some definitely did not — and may still not. Others just found humor in the @rickrudescalves post going viral and decided to keep pouring gasoline on the fire.
In the following days, more and more couch memes began popping up on social media. On Craigslist, a listing for “JD VANCE’S USED COUCH!!!” was posted for sale in San Francisco with plenty of nods to the original meme.
Screenshots of the Craigslist ad made its way back to X/Twitter and the whole thing continued to snowball.
Seems like pretty normal internet behavior
Yeah, pretty much the standard gross stuff you find online. But then things took a turn when the Associated Press tried to debunk the original claim.
The Associated Press really fact-checked the JD Vance and couch story?
Well, it tried. And now for a quick digression on how fact-checking works.
There’s actually a pretty standard process for fact-checking false claims and fake news. The AP provided an overview of its fact-checking standards in a 2017 memo from Vice President for Standards John Daniszewski which reads, in part:
Be sure we are right. Never state in a fact check anything of which we’re not certain.
…
Our ruling doesn’t have to be black and white. Statements can fall along a wide range of accuracy, and we don’t use a rigid rating scale to make our judgments. A statement can be false, exaggerated, a stretch, a selective use of data, partly or mostly true. We use the most apt description that’s supported by what we know.
That first point is especially important here, which makes sense. If you’re writing a fact-check, every claim must be 100 percent correct and therefore the claims themselves must be verifiable. There is no wiggle room anywhere in the story. Whatever grey area does exist must be fully explained.
The AP posted its fact check on the Vance/couch claims on Wednesday afternoon. By Thursday morning it was taken down, having seemingly failed to adhere to a key standard with its headline “No, JD Vance did not have sex with a couch”.
the bizarre story was here https://t.co/j4RP2CmWQ6 pic.twitter.com/SQ8IRT5xA6
— Andy Kaczynski (@KFILE) July 25, 2024
Get past the comical nature of the AP’s headline and you can instantly see what part of the problem is here. The AP has no way to be 100 percent certain of its claim. There is no possible way to verify it.
Now, the AP could’ve said Vance never wrote about any such incident in Hillbilly Elegy, but that isn’t what the headline claimed.
It’s a little bit like when you tell your friends about a trick shot you made with a basketball when no one was around to see it. Whether or not it happened isn’t worth debating because there’s no way to prove it.
That’s what happened here. And it’s partly why the story had to come down.
According to Semafor‘s Max Tani, the AP said the “story didn’t go through the wire service’s standard editing process” and they are looking into how it was published. Hopefully we hear more about what went wrong soon.
A spokesperson for the AP tells me this story didn’t go through the wire service’s standard editing process, and the AP is looking into how it was published. The spokesperson also emphasizes that the piece did not go out on the wire to AP customers. https://t.co/Rk4TbnYYSB
— Max Tani (@maxwelltani) July 25, 2024
The AP story coming down just made the meme stronger, didn’t it?
Buddy, you already know it.
Whatever new life the meme gained when the AP first published its story kept building momentum after they took it down.
Now we’ve reached the point where you have a faction of the internet believing Vance actually had sectional relations because the AP removed the story, another faction who believes its all a giant conspiracy and everyone else in between who just keeps getting off more jokes at the absurdity of the whole situation.
So to answer the original question: did anything really happen?
Most likely not, but that’s between the cushions and Vance.
