Fact Check!

don’t believe everything you hear. ESPECIALLY if it’s in the form of one of those ridiculous viral posts on Facebook. on three separate occasions this week i have read a post on Facebook, and been completely appalled at the supposed “fact” they are exposing. each time i’ve looked up each “fact” it turned out to be mostly untrue.

in each post, there’s usually just enough fact spattered in there to sound believable, then they hit you with something shocking. the first part was believable enough, so why not the next part?

why?

SHEEP! 

people are fucking SHEEP. when you get enough of them together, even just a cyberspace gathering, they’ll believe practically anything.

don’t worry, i’m not actually trying insult anyone. i’ve fallen under the same spell, and been duped many times myself. i’ve also felt the embarrassment of being corrected by someone else. nowadays, i don’t repost ANYTHING without at least checking Snopes.com first. if snopes confirms it, then i might repost it… after googling it to make sure snopes isn’t lying.

on several occasions i’ve been the asshole who comes out and says “hey, you’re wrong, here’s the snopes post”. each time i’ve felt like a total dick, but it just really gets under my skin every time i see one of those things reposted.

it makes me wonder what the original writer of the post thinks about it. he (or she) has literally millions of people believing this tripe he came up with because he got bored one day, and decided if a post of his could go viral.

i don’t even bother with political posts. i wish Facebook had a “politics” detector so i could just block them out completely. seriously. politicians lie so much, if they tried to utter the truth they’d probably implode. how can anybody believe anything they see or hear anymore? how am i supposed to believe anything anybody says, when they’re also posting stupid shit like “onions attract the influenze virus” or “repost this or you’ll die in 5 minutes” or quotes from actors who DIDN’T REALLY SAY IT.  (the most notably recent false quote was the one circulating by Morgan Freeman, in regards to the Sandy Hook tragedy. don’t believe snopes? here’s another article.) oh, by the way… Morgan Freeman isn’t dead either. by the time i saw that little piece of facebook viral gold, i knew better than to just blindly believe it, and Google/Snoped it before reposting.

seriously. just check it out before you believe it. if you can find 2 or more sources that confirm it, then by all means post away. otherwise, it’s probably best to resist clicking the “share” button, and try not to spread the ignorance.

 

*sigh* i know. this was totally bitchy and unfair to write. a lot of people fall for this shit, myself included. if it makes you feel any better, i am just as critical of myself when i make this kind of mistake.