failure to hoax check

[LexiaFira]

just a little rant here because myself and hubs are now apparently the go to hoax checkers. (which is fine with me for the moment)

WILL my friends and family on facebook (polietely excluding the ever so genius and genuine cs/fratching friends) STOP POSTING stuff without researching it so i don't have my proverbial balls busted for saying oh wait its a HOAX!

i meam i am both sad and relieved when i declare something a hoax. Relieved because its not real, but sad that someone thought about something so horrible and decided hey lets spread some pandemonium today.
which means i will get this all over email, and facebook several times....yay.

I do add a sorry to burst your bubble or sorry but its fake, and thank you for trying to inform everyone. but about to send a letter of if you want to keep us informed fine, but do some damn research first so this can be avoided would be nice. i use snopes and hoax hacker....
granted the most recent one i searched for did not show up under the keywords i used but did show up in the whats new section so yeah....

tired of this because this is the...hell i lost count this time, the UMPTEENTH time (I recall at one point it had been the tenth time) i have politely asked these people to FACT CHECK or at least say SOMETHING before just posting this picture....


yes i could stop doing being the fact checker but my morals and sense of duty cry out "no cannot let this stand you MUST do something!" so i do. silly me

thank you for letting me vent

[HYHYBT]

The trouble is that *nobody* is going to check out every story they hear; it has to register as suspicious, and some people's sense of what is probable is skewed.

[Aethian]

It's kinda like how I started to lose a friendship over calling out a lot of fake posts that she was putting up of "OMG lookit this!!!!1!!!" Of course this same person has just recently done something in my view unforgivable so I don't even try to think of her as existing anymore.

[boringscreenname]

A friend of mine posts those stupid hoaxes all the damn time on Facebook. I started replying with a Snopes link to them, but she just claims "Oh I don't care, what does it hurt to share them?" Umm you're spreading misinformation.....

Then she started posting the "rants" that famous people have said, which are almost always racist and offensive. When I posted the Snopes link on those she said, "Well I don't care that they never really said that , but I wish they did." So I stopped bothering and her posts have all been hidden.

[Ree]

I had 2 friends share that stupid Bill Gates photoshopped picture.
One of them said, "Don't know if it's true, but I could use the money."
I posted and said, "Sorry It's a hoax," and added a link to the hoax busting site.
Then I saw that a mutual friend had also shared the pic, so I posted the same thing. Then I made a status update saying, "This is a hoax. Please stop sharing."
Within minutes, the second person had posted a status update on their page, asking why some people feel the need to act as Facebook police.
I replied and said, "I'm guilty of that. In my opinion, sharing hoaxes only causes more problems. What's the point in passing on false information? In a lot of cases, all those "Share the heck out of this, guys," warnings are just designed to get likes and increase popularity for the person's Facebook page, and in some cases, it's a way for scammers and spammers to find new victims with every share.
This same person repeatedly gets her page hacked, and spam messages are constantly popping up under her name.
She constantly posts those scam links supposedly leading to tons of game tokens or prizes, and Facebook credits. All they really are, is a way to get info about people so they can spam and scam.
If she only realized that she wouldn't have these problems if she would stop sharing this crap!

I realize that not everybody immediately recognizes hoaxes, but, seriously, why can't people just take the time to verify before passing it on?
If I get a link about some supposedly miracle cure, I will take time to actually verify if it has any merit in case it does more harm than good to forward it along.
If I get a quote supposedly attributed to certain celebrities, I will do a quick quote search to see if there is a legitimate source to verify that they actually said it.
It's the same with statistics about government funding, etc.

It's just a very annoying thing that a huge majority of people assume, because it's on the internet or Facebook, and has been shared thousands of times, that it must be true!

[BlaqueKatt]

A friend of mine posts those stupid hoaxes all the damn time on Facebook. I started replying with a Snopes link to them, but she just claims "Oh I don't care, what does it hurt to share them?" Umm you're spreading misinformation.....

I had to unfriend someone due to worse, they claimed anyone who disproved anything, or changed their minds on anything due to new information was "paid off", to the point of making the ludicrous claim that a website advertising itself as the prime information source for the "new world order" was more reputable than the BBC. (also according to said ex-friend, Bill Gates has been paid off*, as has been an investigative journalist who writes books on climate change.)

*also every single scientist on the planet is part of a vast conspiracy, including me.

[Ree]

Another new FB trend is the Facebook Vigilantism with the "Name and shame" posts containing a person's picture and/or name, accusing them of all kinds of atrocities, or there is a picture of some horrendous act asking if anyone knows who the perpetrator is because they need to be brought to justice.

I see so many people just blindly sharing and assuming, and nobody even bothers to actually check and see if the picture does belong to the person named, or if the story is even factual.

Some of them are old stories, and either the picture was proven to be a setup or hoax, or the person was already dealt with by the law.

These kinds of posts cause unnecessary panic, not to mention, if the person isn't actually guilty of the accusation, or the wrong name or picture is posted, it can cause all kinds of problems in their personal life for no reason.

It can also cause all kinds of problems for the prosecutors.

While the heinous attack may well have occurred as described, it is difficult to fully validate the claims in the message due to the absence of credible reports about the incident.

But, in any case, creating and sharing accusatory messages of this nature is far from helpful and is in fact more likely to make things worse. Such "name and shame" campaigns can jeopardize the prosecution's case. They can play into the hands of the criminal's defense team, who may claim undue media attention and accusations have compromised their client's right to a fair trial. The messages may also inadvertently identify the victims of crime and their families, thereby exposing them to unwanted media attention or the threat of retaliatory attacks. The messages may encourage vigilante attacks or threats of violence against people accused of crimes. Far from exacting any sort of meaningful justice, such actions may result in charges being laid against the vigilantes, thereby helping nobody and achieving nothing worthwhile. And mistaken identities - perhaps exacerbated by poor quality photographs of the accused person and the fact that many individuals around the world may share the same name - may result in attacks on innocent people.

I have read of 2 different FB "share and like whoring" alerts where pictures of someone else's child have fraudulently been used and attributed to a story.
One story was about sick children, where sharing was supposed to bring untold riches to help the families out, because Facebook, or one company or another was donating money to help them out. The pictures were actually stolen images of very sick babies not related to the story, some who had already died, and seeing it shared on this post in this context was very painful for the families. (Not to mention, neither Facebook, nor any other company donates a single cent for shared posts of any type.)
The other was a post asking people to share or like so it could bring a smile to a young girl with Down's Syndrome, who had been bullied or told she was ugly. The picture of the little girl was used without permission from her actual family, and it was not their daughter's story. They knew nothing about any bullying or anything else.

Then there are the fake Amber Alerts.
They cause people to become jaded when the real thing happens. People just wonder if it's yet another hoax, and they stop paying attention.

It's bloody annoying.

[bara]

Thats one of the reasons that I normally only share funny cat pictures and similar things.

[Hyena Dandy]

I have a similar issue. I have a friend, who I very much like, who has a tendency to post things on his page, and share them off of other pages he agrees with. Sometimes he'll share something which is outright false, with a bit of commentary agreeing with it.

http://www.snopes.com/crime/justice/click.asp

http://www.snopes.com/politics/obama/impeachment.asp

Like the stories referenced there, or the Palookaville Post quote about Feinstein saying
“When the gunman realizes that nobody else is armed, he will lay down his weapons and turn himself in…. that’s just human nature.”

When I call him on it, he doesn't claim they're not hoaxes, but he says he knew they were satire all along. And that frustrates me. It's like... You knew they were satire? You shared that saying "You just proved you don't live in reality." You didn't share it saying it was satire. The page you shared it FROM didn't share it saying it was satire. Why do you keep covering these things? I'd have a lot more respect for it if he just said "You're right, I was mistaken." That's something I have a lot of respect for.

[Pixilated]

I confess to having fallen down on a few of these and been called out on it ... now I try to use the skills I supposedly learned in journalism school before sharing this stuff. Thanks for the hoax hackers website name; I've been using snopes for ages but can always use another one.

Recently somebody posted two photos: a rather unsavoury-looking couple and a badly beaten young woman. The claim was this couple had beaten up this autistic, wheelchair-bound girl and people needed to pass this along so this couple could be found and brought to justice! Only problem was ... there was NO contact information for any authorities anywhere (police, FBI, Interpol), so even if somebody did spot this pair (who were probably just taking silly photos) what were they supposed to do about it?

P.S. Did you mean the "hoax-slayer" website?

I*snip*

*also every single scientist on the planet is part of a vast conspiracy, including me.

If you're plotting world domination, can I join?

[Ginger Tea]

I thankfully don't get any of these sent my way, I do get a tonne of loveydovey and empowering motivational images in my feed from the fiance of a mate oop norf but I ignore them as I am not the inteded recipitent, even get em when it's sent direct to their wall ...

But due to the vast majority of hoaxes and miss information, I couldn't give a flying about that whole Kone 2012 thing, was he a real war lord in africa using children in his armies? well he wouldn't be the first or last.
Then on art of trolling there was a Kone esque post and the poster told the commentor that it was the guy from Predator (was gonna say Dutch but that was Arnie I think), made me wonder, was Kone a larger troll using that actor's image, or did they just see a black guy in military fitigues and think OMG my friend just posted that he likes Kone.

Also how do you pay off Bill Gates after he's a multibillionaire? or are they going to head cannon that him being paid off helped establish Microsoft's dominance?

[Greenday]

Just saw some Farmville friend post this:

Don't buy the new Pepsi can coming out with pics of the Empire State Building and the Pledge of Allegiance on them. Pepsi left out 2 little words in the pledge: "Under God". Pepsi didn't want to offend anyone. So if we don't buy them, they won't be offended when they don't receive our money with the words "In God We Trust" on it. How fast can u repost

A simple google of "Pepsi Under God" and snopes was the first link. What a tool.

Plus the lazy spelling of "you" just adds to the ridiculousness.

[Ree]

Oh good grief! Not that one again.
Pepsi even has a disclaimer on their site debunking it.

[PepperElf]

heh. my bf hates that too. he gets a lot of "fw: fw: fw: <etc>" emails about "omg check this out" where ... it turns out to be a silly hoax.


what i personally hate is when the hoaxes make their circuits to the review sites.
I'm actually impressed though. I haven't seen any letters at PFB accusing Pepsi of hating the pledge of allegiance this year. Yet. I probably just jinxed it though.

A simple google of "Pepsi Under God" and snopes was the first link. What a tool.

I had only read page 1 when I posted. that's funny. I guess great minds think alike.

I'm betting the people circulating that crap don't like it when they're told... "So you mean 'Dr. Pepper' right? And you know they discontinued the can in 2002 so... what's your point again?"

[BrenDAnn]

*raises hand* I, too, debunk hoaxes like that on Facebook. It annoys me to no end when people post stuff like that. The latest I saw was the whole muggers putting something on the windshield to get the person out of the car to carjack them thing...which, of course, I linked to the snopes article on. All I can say is thank whatever deity for the filters Facebook has. All I have to do is click to receive important updates, status updates only, and boom...no more hoaxy pics!

ETA: Just happened again, with one of my aunts and the whole "Lauren the co-ed evaded a rapist posing as an unmarked cop" story. WHY am I the one debunking this bs all the time??