A very popular hoax was perpetrated on Facebook this weekend. Here's one short story on it, concerning a page indicating "RIP Morgan Freeman."
I
saw the page being "liked" by a couple of my friends. I thought first,
what? But my first instinct was to suspect its falsity. I went to my NY
Times iPad app, checked the Obituaries section. No mention of
Freeman. A quick Google search revealed the hoax. Of course, all you
had to do was look at the FB page's "about" page and there you have your taunting suggestion: stop believing what you see on the internet.
It's
kind of scary how fast rumors can be spread thanks to social media.
What are the implications? And on this anniversary of the worst
terrorist attack on American soil, how do you imagine we would have
experienced it so differently had Facebook and Twitter been firmly in
place as the news of the plane attacks began to spread?
These kinds of rumors are actually a big pet peeve of mine. I have no idea why anyone would post their own "Rest in peace Morgan Freeman" statuses before doing a simple google search. I would never believe that my facebook friends found out about such breaking news before a legitimate news outlet did so. With social media and the internet in general, it is always a good idea to look for the same information from several legitimate sources before deciding to take it as truth.
ReplyDeleteI think I would have been disturbed to see all of the rumors that would have spread through facebook in 2001, because I predict that they would have been racial in nature. I remember a few news stories that were nothing but speculation and looking back on it, I see them as prejudicial. Those were major media outlets so I can't imagine what the average American, angry and hurt, would post.
Rumors tend to overestimate rather than underestimate. I think things would have been extremely hectic if I logged onto my facebook on that fateful day. People would be posting without making sure that their information was factual. Speculation would spread as fact and facts would be lost in a sea of misinformation.
Of course, websites like Twitter and Facebook could have also been helpful. If the majority of people in the second tower got Twitter updates, they would have known exactly what the situation they were in was.