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.
