This isn't a hoax!

From sharing a page for a child dying of cancer so that they can receive donations from every like the picture receives, to Heineken sponsoring a dog fight. Just about every day within social media networks like Facebook, we are constantly bombarded with ‘shocking’ news stories. Most of what we are confronted with is information of events which hardly seem that it could be possible at all. Yet because there is a picture of a dying child or because it has a lot of detail about the situation, some of us are compelled to think that the information that we are presented with is correct. Mostly due to the face that we do not want to come across as a cruel and insensitive person so we’d like to feel as though that we are contributing in some way.

Before the whole social media uproar, I personally learnt the tough way that everything that I read or see on television (including news shows) isn’t necessarily the truth. It’s a skewed truth of what that particular show wants me to believe or their personal view of the story. You only have to listen to the many stories from different people who experience a tragedy to hear countless different versions of the same event. So why hasn’t a majority of people caught on to the fact that social media is doing the same thing but on a much wider scale? I mean does anyone still believe anymore when they receive an email either claiming that they’ve won millions of dollars, or that there is a wealthy person who is looking for someone to hold their millions for them anymore? No! So why is this any different? The even sad thing is that some of these stories also appear every year, and every year there is a group of people who fall for the same hoaxes.

I personally think that there are three factors involved. Firstly it brings to some of us a sense of guilt involved. This is just simply from noticing that every post that the hoaxes are involved in have sentences within them that say the same thing over and over. Things like ‘Like if you’re against rape, ignore if you are for rape.’ Of course none of us are for rape! But for many people to simple ignore this will imply a sense of guilt, and there is nothing to be guilty about. This especially happens if a friend of yours has shared the article and you may think that your friends and family will think of you has a horrible person if you do not contribute in some way.

Secondly I think it comes also from laziness. The whole TL; DR (too long; didn’t read) type of lazy or just couldn’t be bothered looking into it. So they shared and are not even bothered to look into it, or find out what it is all about.

Lastly, the only other explanation that I could think of at the top of my head is that people who share this type of information actually believe what the information is telling us. For these types of people I have a couple of websites for you. Hoax-Slayer.com and Snopes.com. These particular websites have information about any old or new stories that you seem that are just isn’t right. If you’d prefer, a simple Google search would suffix or just simply use your common sense.

I recently heard within my favourite weekly podcast (http://www.chillpakhollywood.com/) that you could come up with the most out there theory or idea about anything , and you’ll find somewhere within the vast internet a webpage dedicated to it with theories and facts. You could even come up with the theory that monkeys have been living within planet Venus before the arrival of man and there will someone backing up your theory. This personally proves to me even more that we should all be careful of the things we see and hear not only on the internet but also within new stories.

I could go on and on about the subject, but the main thing that I wanted to point out to everyone is mostly just have a second think before you go sharing a story that seems very unlikely. Take a bit of common sense and also have a look within the internet itself to see if there has been any repeat of this happening in the past before. I can almost guarantee you that there are a lot of these stories they have all been around for many years, and it's making its yearly cycle.