Sounds legit…
One of my favorite things about social media is that we can instantly share information with people all around the world. One of my least favorite things about social media is that we can share false information with people all around the world.
Sure, there are “fact checking” setups in place, but doesn’t matter. As the old saying goes (often, ironically misattributed to Mark Twain), “A lie can travel halfway around the world while the truth is still putting on its shoes.”
Twain never said that, but all it took was for someone years ago to say he did and now many people quote him, never even questioning whether or not he might have said it. As best anyone can figure, it was actually Thomas Francklin, an 18th century preacher, who said something close to that in 1787. What he actually said was, “Falsehood will fly to every corner of the earth while the truth lags behind without the vigor to overtake her enemy.”
That is actually quite a bit more elegant and poetic, but I guess we dumbed it down over the years for more mass appeal. Either way, the idea is the same and it’s as true today as it was in 1787. People, for a variety of reasons, love spreading lies, and the internet has made it much easier. And people are so very, very willing to swallow these lies hook, line and sinker if they tell the story they want to hear.
A recent headline I saw online from a web site that on the surface looks like a real “news” web site, styled to look
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like CNN or Fox News, reads “Must See: Video shows proof who, how and why the 2020 election was stolen” complete with graphics and a photo and everything. Well, if you stopped even for a minute to dig into this “news” story before clicking the “share” button, you would see that it is from a site called rumble.com. And if you went to that site, you would see it’s very much one of those “Bigfoot and Elvis get married in secret ceremony” types of sites.
“Never let the truth get in the way of a good story.”
That’s one that Mr. Twain definitely did say and that’s social media in a nutshell.
What’s most infuriating is that, like the Francklin quote, the original story gets twisted and turned and misattributed along the way and whatever actual real information might have been put out gets turned into a bunch of baloney and those who so desperately want their opinion to be fact just eat it up and spit it back out for everyone on their list of “friends” or “followers” or whatever.
My favorite is when someone presents some obviously wrong bit of information and then proudly proclaims, “I’ve done my research!”
No, you haven’t. At best you did a Google search.
And I have the same access to the internet as you do.
As a side note, the poet philosopher “Stone Cold” Steve Austin has a motto: “DTA” which is shorthand for “Don’t trust anyone.”
And these days, it’s more true than ever.
Have you checked your email recently? If so, you might have gotten some completely legitimate mssages but I’ll bet you’ve also been informed that the payment for your “Norton AnitVirus” software needs authorization or your credit card has been hacked so you need to enter it on this totally for-real link to make sure it’s secure.
Yes, the scammers are out in force as always, and no I don’t mean the ones where you won the Spanish Lottery or the Crown Prince of Nigeria needs you to send him a couple grand so he can wire you his millions from his secret hideout or whatever. I mean scams that absolutely look real unless you really dig into them.
I recently got an email from Amazon alerting me that someone had changed the password on my account and that if it wasn’t me I needed to investigate. Well, it turned out that my wife did indeed change the paaword because she couldn’t remember it… instead of just asking me what it was!
Well, just a couple of days later, we were sitting on the couch and she said, “That’s weird. It’s asking me to put my unser name and password in again.” I asked who was and she said Amazon.
I practically smacked her phone out of her hand like it was a spider. I asked just how exactly was “Amazon” asking her to enter her user name and password and she said they had sent her a text saying that due to suspicious activity, shew needed to enter her log-in information or Amazon would have to “freeze” her account.
And sure enough, it was a bogus message. It was a sort-of real sounding link that did, at least, have the word Amazon in in, unlike the super-legit text message I got from “Bank of America” at 3 a.m. Sunday morning letting me know my account had been disabled and I needed to enter my account number and such at the link provided.
Thanks guy, but I don’t even have a Bank of America account, and the link was something like “http://url.asia.freelinks” which is, I’m sure, what a legitimate message from Bank of America would look like.
Anyway, it’s all fake. Sure, you can find “evidence” of just about anything you want if you’re willing to ignore 99% of the results that don’t say what you want them to. Just remember what Abraham Lincoln told us — “Don’t believe everything you read on the internet.”
And we all know Honest Abe wouldn’t steer us wrong.
