You Really Believe That?

In a world of email, social media and digital camera phones, it is now easier than ever to keep tabs on what's going on. We can share everything with our friends and family and they can share back. And while that is a wonderful convenience, the ease of connection also has a dark side sometimes. The sad fact is that the simplicity of sharing information makes it even easier for someone to say anything they want, no matter how untrue, and let it spread like wildfire across the Internet.

I've gotten my share of forward emails containing completely fabricated information. People will forward everything from imaginary children dying of cancer to photoshopped images of sharks hunting people in the Hurricane Sandy aftermath. The part that amazes me is the fact that people often forward such emails without thinking twice. I guess if someone writes something in an email then it must be true right?

I recently got one of those political ones (just when I thought political election emails would be over) about a politician with some supposedly elaborate, evil plan to take over the world (and I've gotten similar ones for every politician on every side of the line, so no one's exempt or being especially picked on here). They even included the snopes.com link in the email so it could prove the email's accuracy. Amusingly enough, the snopes.com link they gave denounced that very email as being false (pretty much the only thing true in the email was the politician's name).

The claims in the email were so far-fetched, it left me wondering how someone could actually believe it enough to forward it, or more importantly, how they could forward it without even checking on its accuracy. No one in the long line of forwarders had bothered to click on the Snopes link in the email or they would have seen immediately that it was a fraud. (I wonder if someone put the snopes.com link in the email to give people a false sense of security, knowing that no one would actually click on it before blindly hitting the share button.)

Now I'll admit that my love for politicians is sparse at best, but I am a lover of truth. So it saddens me that someone can write something completely false knowing that anyone who receives it won't bother checking whether or not it's true. They'll just hit forward without a second thought and continue the message's cycle through cyberspace, sometimes adding something corny at the top like "Scary if true." To me that says they couldn't even spare two seconds to click a verification link before mindlessly sending the message back out across their network.

I remember Thumper the rabbit saying "If you can't say something nice, then don't say nothing at all." Maybe we should change that to "If you don't have the time to verify the forward, then don't forward nothing at all." The best way to prevent misinformation is by not sharing it without verification. If the shoe were on the other foot and the information was about ourselves, I'm sure we'd hope someone would verify the accuracy before forwarding it. Shouldn't we extend the same courtesy to everyone else, politician or otherwise?

Snopes.com isn't everything, but it is a good place to start (especially when they put the link right there in the forward email to begin with.) If we all just took a moment to check the legitimacy of something before we forwarded it, it might help make the Internet a slightly more truthful place.

Have you ever gotten an email that you knew had to be fraudulent? Were you amazed by how many people forwarded it without even thinking about it?