“Fake factual language” about Bad Bunny
Did you hear about or watch Bad Bunny’s February 8th halftime show at the Superbowl?
After the show, my social media feeds were filled with incredibly positive videos and posts. Like families dancing in their living rooms and jumping for joy when their country was named as part of America. People in their homes and offices and Canadian forests and Peruvian cevicherias recreating the dance numbers. And crowds gathered in bars and restaurants and nightclubs, singing along with every word.
But that’s my corner of the internet — not everything posted about Bad Bunny was positive. Some of the negative commentary sounded like this:
“This guy has no talent.”
“It wasn’t hype, it wasn’t special; it was boring and mediocre.”
“Is it just me or is Latin pop music terrible? It just sounds like ‘thunka thunka thunka’ to me.”
“Like, objectively, it sounds awful. It was not good.”
“He’s a horrible, horrible singer like holy crap is he bad. When I looked up lyrics in English I was like ‘holy crap this is literally re***ed.’”
Let’s look at a common distortion found in comments like these: using language that presents a subjective opinion as if it is an objective fact. I call this distortion fake factual language.
When you dig into statements using fake factual language, you will usually uncover one of these three messages.
I don’t like it, so it isn’t good.
I don’t like it, so it’s gross or offensive.
I don’t understand it, so it isn’t meaningful or important.
As you can see, each message starts out with an opinion and then makes a false conclusion that this opinion is an objective fact for everyone. This is the hidden distortion.
Opinion or fact?
When talking about the creative arts, people often present subjective opinions as if they are objective facts. We see this all the time in reviews by paid critics, who usually write as if their perceptions and judgments are neutral, authoritative, and correct.
But!
These reviews sometimes have a fatal flaw — the reviewer may not recognize that their own limited knowledge base or limited experience or limited skill set does not allow them to do a good assessment.
They don’t recognize their own subjectivity.
_____
In anthropology, we use the term subjectivity to refer to someone’s specific social position, personal experiences, and individual history. Subjectivity shapes your understanding and assessment of the world around you.
Anthropologists used to collect data as if they were neutral and objective observers. Like they could show up to a place with a notebook and tape recorder and just collect “good” data.
Today we know better. We know that people we’re interacting with will change their behavior based on how they see us. We know that we need to always take the specific social context into account when we’re analyzing and interpreting.
And we know that, if we were raised in a different language or location or culture, we might not recognize when something is significant or meaningful to someone local. It might go right over our heads, because we weren’t trained to recognize it or decode it.
But this is knowledge that hasn’t made it out that far beyond academic walls. Many cultural critics, especially if they come from the mainstream, just don’t take their own subjectivity into account.
So we end up with movies like Sinners, the most Oscar-nominated film of all time, dismissed by some critics as “a popcorn movie” and “just a horror flick” and left off several Best Of year-end lists. Or critics who called the movie Turning Red, which has an Asian Canadian heroine and in part addresses girls’ puberty, “unrelatable” and “niche.”
Better assessments
Who is a “genius”?
What is an “important” book or film?
What does “leadership” look like?
These questions are frequently answered with fake factual language. Language that pretends that one interpretation, an interpretation based on one particular knowledge base and set of experiences, is objectively true.
And these fake factual distortions lead to distorted outcomes. For example:
The words genius and brilliant are used to describe men far more frequently than women.
The top 20 movies on IMDb’s Top 250 movies list (ranked by community members) were directed by white men.*
79% of Fortune 100 CEOs are male, even though male people only make up 50% of the world’s population.
In the workplace, distorted language in assessments can cause real problems. These problems show up most frequently when:
Assessing a candidate during the hiring process
Giving informal feedback about someone’s behavior or work
Giving a formal performance review
Making promotion decisions
Fake factual language may sound like calling someone’s textured hair or low-prestige dialect “unprofessional.”
Or labeling someone “disrespectful” or “aggressive” just for disagreeing or offering a counterpoint.
Dismissing “glue work” as unimportant and not valuable.
Or not promoting someone because they lack “executive presence,” meaning they don’t talk and act like a stereotypical corporate executive.
What can you do?
Be on the lookout for subjective opinions being presented as objective reality.
When you encounter fake factual language outside of the workplace, you can push back by pointing out that this is just one person’s subjective point of view.
Inside the workplace, your best bet is to use standard criteria and a detailed evaluation checklist or rubric. When I work with clients on the language of assessments, I guide them to:
Make it external
Make it granular
Make it regular
In other words,
Move evaluation criteria outside of people’s heads and into a document. We don’t want to evaluate based on gut feelings or instincts or “vibes.”
High-level labels make it easier to use fake factual language. Using more specific and granular criteria can help you avoid distortions. For example, you might have professional as something you’re looking for in a job candidate. But professional is a really subjective term. Instead, you can brainstorm and list granular components of behaving professionally, like consistently meeting deadlines, checking to make sure work is high quality, and managing time well.
Once you have a document that lays out assessment criteria in a granular way, use that document every time you do an assessment.
It takes some time, effort, and planning to avoid the distortions that come with fake factual language. But it’s worth it! When you can separate fact from opinion, you end up with better assessments and better outcomes.
_____
*When The Matrix was funded, produced, released, and reviewed, its directors were perceived as men.
Copyright 2026 © Worthwhile Research & Consulting
Would your sales team benefit from a cost-effective tool to boost conversion rates? Worthwhile trains sales professionals to avoid outdated or inaccurate language that tanks sales. Our program, Dealmakers and Dealbreakers: Language Hacks for Smoother Sales guides teams to higher-quality and more effective words. Better language leads to more trust, higher rapport, and stronger prospect relationships.
Email us at admin@worthwhileconsulting.com to learn more.