So a long-lost cousin got in touch with me a few weeks ago on Facebook, and because I like her mother (my aunt) who lives with her, I friended her. Last week we met up again at a family reunion.
Since I friended her, her posts have been about food, family, and glurge, which is tolerable. Then she posted the old chestnut about Starbucks refusing to send coffee to our troops (in Iraq!) and urging anyone who buys from Starbucks to stop.
So I posted the Snopes link debunking that old story.
This is the first time I’ve ever done this. Most of the time when people post garbage like that I just ignore it. For some reason, I couldn’t let this one go by. Maybe because it was so obviously old and obviously contrived, and she never thought to question it. Not my job to teach her to think, but I though I would try it just once. Anyway, I won’t be surprised if I don’t see any more of her posts (not sure how any of that works, but I assume that is something that is under her control).
I’m sure many of you have done something similar. Did you ever regret it?
I do it all the time, maybe it’s a character flaw, but I never regret it. You post bullshit, you gotta pay the consequences…it amazes me that several relatives never seem to learn, never think to check before posting.
It depends how you deliver the message; i.e. “ha! this is a hoax you idiot!” vs “Er, guys… you might not have realised this is a hoax…”.
In the latter case, if you get unfriended, it’s sad, but… oh well - can’t fix everyone. If you get unfriended in the former case, you need a little bit of fixing yourself.
Yes I’ve done it. Yes I’ve regretted it. But as others have mentioned, it’s really about how you to it. Making other people feel stupid is not a very nice thing to do.
Not on facebook (I don’t use it), but I used to get a few email forwards, usually of the ‘OMG there’s this virus going around and Bill Gates himself has said it will destroy your computer and eat your children!!11!1’ sort.
I always used to reply with ‘Uh, sorry but that’s a hoax. [insert snopes link]’. Nobody ever used to reply (either to say thanks or to bitch me out), and eventually the emails stopped coming. I’d like to think they learned to fact check before sending these emails out, but I suspect they just migrated to facebook to spread the BS on there instead.
Sometimes you just can’t fix stupid, and pointing out people’s ignorance just puts their back up. You just have to make a choice between losing them as a friend or putting up with them spreading misinformation.
I’ve never regretted it. I’ve been fooled enough by Internet stuff that I don’t automatically assume someone else who has been fooled is an idiot.
Usually I go with the “You should be aware…” tack unless they’re a close enough friend that I can just type “Nope!” and add the link. I’ve never been unfriended, although at least one person has continued to argue the point.
I do it to my mom all the time, and sometimes to other friends - mainly if I think that it’s someone who actually has critical thinking skills, but isn’t using them (MOM!) There are a few idiots that I don’t even bother with, because they’d far prefer to believe fake news sites and conspiracy theories than to accept research and cites. (And for a couple of correspondents, I intentionally don’t link Snopes - at least one friend, whom I love dearly but want to shake now and again, is certain that the Mikkelsons have some horrible agenda.)
I’ve been defriended once, and was glad of it. Usually, I try to post the links tactfully, and sometimes I just post the link on my own social media with a brief statement like “this one’s going around again! Not true!” without pointing any fingers.
My sister has a second FB page where she likes to post trivia. But she just copies and pastes, never verifies. I pointed it out a couple of times (no, I wasn’t snotty about it) and her response would be “I just post what I find.” And we’re not talking really weird, obscure stuff - we’re talking one keyword in Google and the answer is the top item!
So I unfriended her trivia page and I feel so much better! If she and her friends want to believe some of the idiocy she accepts as true, I don’t have to know the details.
If you spend a lot of time on the SDMB, you forget that the rest of the internet operates on looser tolerances. So when I see nonsense on FB I usually ignore it. I hide everything except posts that show how my friends are doing, anyway. But if the post is really egregious I drop in a cryptic (to them) reply, such as “straw man.”
I recently corrected a glurgy Facebook post about the chairs growing through the chairs supposedly left out in WW II Poland. It’s actually art, and the real story is cooler than the obviously impossible urban legend. I included links to pictures of the remainder of the exhibit, and it seems my correction was appreciated.
I’m just gobsmacked that anyone would believe that. :eek:
I didn’t even have to read the text - it took me about one second of looking at the picture to figure out that the WWII story couldn’t possibly be true. I mean, do those chairs even slightly look like they’ve been left out in the elements for 76 years?
Yeah, I’ve done something like that before. One of my relatives e-mailed me one of those alarmist glurge articles. I looked it up on Snopes and parts of it were false, so I sent her an e-mail along the lines of, “I don’t know if you realized this, but some parts of the article you sent me are actually not true, and here’s my source.” She thanked me and apologized. A while later, I got another alarmist glurge article from her, did the same thing, and got the same response. The alarmist glurge articles stopped. I don’t know if she stopped sending them or whether she stopped sending them to me, but either way, mission accomplished.
I have posted a few Snopes corrections over the years on FB postings. Usually, if not universally, I got a ‘thank you, I should have checked that before I posted’, reply.
Yeah, the woman who shared the obviously impossible glurgy tale took it hook, line, and sinker. You could hear her getting choked up by what she wrote.
I stay pretty quite on Facebook because a lot of my family and friends post nonsense like that. I don’t want to embarrass them by calling them out, because they are also pretty thin skinned.
But if they bring it up in person, I will say something because I can more easily moderate my tone and better get my message across.
I got into a heated argument with a friend of a friend over teh “112” posting - them because they had puportedly checked it with a police officer - They couldnt get over the fact that in the US - the official number is 911 - 112 is no faster/better and may not work - in the cases it does wok, its because the cell providor mapped it to 911, which is not required.
I kept repeating - “why dial a number that may/may not work when you have an option that is guaranteed to work and isn’t any harder to dial”. - posting/reposting that crap could actually cost someone dearly.
If they unfriend me over a snopes (or other correction) - fine by me.
