Don’t you just love Facebook? Well, I do because I use it far too much. Do I love everything about it? Not quite. I do not think I have ever met anyone who says the believe every word they read in the newspapers, never mind most of the internet, but a lot of people believe everything they read on Facebook.
Take the “Win a massive RV or motorhome by just sharing the competition. We will pick a name at random next week!” You share it and guess what? You never win the camper van (other non existent prizes exist). A quick visit to one of the internet debunking sites reveals this: “The Facebook Pages are fraudulent. They are not giving away RVs as claimed. There are no prizes and no winners. The bogus Pages are scams designed to rapidly accumulate large numbers of Page likes. Once the Pages have gained high like numbers, they can be reused for other types of scam or sold on the black market to other scammers.”
Then there are the shaming photos, sometimes years old. “Look at these two thugs. They cut off this dog’s penis and cooked it for lunch”. (I am not sure if this is the actual wording, but you get the drift.) You are shown a picture of a loveable dog minus its penis and two unloveable scallywags laughing their heads off. More often than not, even the most detailed Google comes up with nothing. Many of these things are made up.
In between this fake news, there are real stories. A friend of mine reported a real one just today about a group of violent burglars operating in our locality. It’s also shown on the police website. I call this public service, using social networks to alert friends, whether Facebook friends or real ones, of some bad things that are happening locally. Some of the nonsense cruelty stories, when they are actually real, happened the other side of the country, or even the world, and sometimes many years ago. It is not difficult to separate the wheat from the chaff. One, the genuine alerts, are to share useful information and the other, the bogus alerts exist, I imagine, to make us feel angry. “Let’s hope the police catch this cruel bastard before someone else does” says one Facebook group, suggesting quite clearly that vigilante action is more than possible. And vigilante action is potentially murder. A word of advice: check if something is true before sharing it.
I live by the old adage that if something appears to be too good to be true, then it probably is too good to be true. The free motorhomes and holidays almost certainly don’t exist and it only takes a second to check. By asking people to share click bait nonsense you are potentially handing your friends details to scammers.
Now, I have to go because I’ve just had a telephone call from a nice Indian chap who says I have problems with my Microsoft computer (even though I don’t have a Microsoft computer, but he said he was an expert so that;’s all good) and wants me to give him information in order to fix it. I’ll do that once I make my PPI claim (a very nice lady rang me yesterday – I could be rich). You won’t catch me falling for those Facebook scams. I’m far too smart. “Now which bank details do you want, mate? Ah yes, my security code is…”
