Story Archive

People for the Unethical Treatment of Audiences

The organization that calls itself People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals had an ad agency make a video depicting the abuse of a cat — a computer-generated imaginary cat. Then it reached out to Mashable with a proposal: write about the video without revealing that it’s fake, and then — once it’s had a chance to get the Internet outraged and go viral — you can have the exclusive on the fact that it’s fake. PETA wanted to use the deception to put over its message that big cats are really trained just as abusively as its fake cat. Mashable wrote a story about PETA’s proposal instead. (AC/Bangor Daily News) ...Thus, what PETA actually got across is: it can’t be trusted.