By Brian Lee
Wearing certain types of sanitary pads causes uterine and bladder cancer resulting in the death of 56 girls.
That’s not true and neither is much of the stuff you come across on sites like Facebook these days. Don’t we wish thatwe only had to "like" a child with her legs fused together so that Facebook and CNN would pay $20 per to help pay her medical expenses. Or that "the fruit from the graviola tree is a miraculous natural cancer cell killer 10,000 times stronger than chemo"was true?
Some of these efforts are simple "like farming" ― deceptive methods to boost a site’s profile on Facebook, (thereby boosting its profit power in the site’s news feed algorithm). Others are malicious, sophisticated pranks hoping to garner attention and find out how many suckers bite.
And there are a lot of us who do. Every day, Facebook (and Internet) users are likely to come across dozens of these erroneous tidbits of information and, without checking a website like Snopes or Hoax-Slayer, will dutifully pass it on to their friends.
Some are the modern equivalent of the Weekly World News, the satirical newspaper of the 90s that made the cave-dwelling "Bat Boy" famous. Back then, we seemed to know when something seemed fishy and maybe even enjoyed its ironic humour. The Weekly World News is still alive online as are other humorous newsy sites like The Onion or Daily Mash.
But nowadays, bombarded with headlines like "97% of Terminal Cancer Patients Previously Had This Dental Procedure…," we don’t know what to believe. Incidentally, that too is false and widely debunked by the medical community simply because, at 97%, the dental procedure ― root canals ― could just as easily have been haircuts.
With more and more older (and younger) folks climbing onto the intertube’s information train, it’s become a colossal time drain for anyone concerned enough to continually point out that Bill Gates didn’t write the oft recirculated "Rules Kids Won’t Learn in School." (See p. 27 for the complete list and the real author.) Ditto for many quotes attributed to Morgan Freeman, Nelson Mandela or Albert Einstein.
Photos of a python eating a man? False.
Free iPhones? False.
Man convicted of manslaughter for accidentally killing his wife with a "Dutch oven?" False.
The Gardasil HPV vaccine proved to have caused the deaths of 32 women? False.
Missing child? Probably false.
Mom, are you getting this?
We seem to accept anything if someone shares it digitally. Some of this blind acceptance may stem from a growing mistrust of "mainstream media" ― a pejorative term implying major news sources are under the thumb of corporate political alliances with ulterior motives. While that’s hard to deny, only at newspapers like the Globe and Mail and New York Times will you still find real journalists tasked with the hassles of verifying sources and providing evidence-based facts before they publish a story, whether online or on a broadsheet.
So, the first thing you should ask yourself when your Facebook friend posts something outrageous or revolutionary in its importance is, "Why is the Man keeping it secret?"
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