One time an aunt reposted that “Money Bags” bullshit about a month with five Saturdays, five Sundays, and five Mondays, “a phenomenon that occurs only once every 823 years,” presented as some sort of “Ancient Chinese Secret!” This aunt worked 50+ years as a scientist (microbiology) so I was surprised she had clearly posted this without giving it much thought.
I commented, as gently and clinically as I could, how: #1) this was mathematically impossible, #2) any month with 31 days would have its first three days repeat 5 times, so any of the seven 31-day months of the year that happened to start on a Friday would have 5 Fridays, Saturdays, and Sundays, and #3) it didn’t really make any sense to begin with, as the Chinese didn’t officially adopt a 7-day week until the 20th century.
I generally go with “I hate to be this guy, but…” and then post the snopes link. I’m trying to make it into an “Ahh shucks, anyone could have made this mistake” sort of thing rather than an attack on the poster’s intelligence.
Not sure how it’s received, or whether I’ve been unfriended as a result though.
I wish I could get paid for stomping on this one - as well as the one I saw yet again a week or so ago proclaiming that at exactly 12:30 on August 27th, Mars will be as big as the full moon. :smack:
I try to present it as, “Oh, I saw that too! I looked it up and found this.” and provide the link. As far as I know, no one resents that presentation.
I try to keep my “clarifications” to the most egregious of the righteous indignation. If someone wants to believe that a military ghost was hitchhiking and brought two lonely young people together over an adorable lost puppy, that’s fine by me.
I think that’s a result of how easy it is to share stuff on FB, twitter etc. See something you like? A couple of clicks and it’s gone out to all your friends (well, the ones that haven’t blocked you, anyway ). It’s such an effortless thing that thought doesn’t really come into it.
I got unfriended for correcting someone using a Snopes link, but I was kind of an asshole about it. The friend occasionally posted the alarmist right wing fear-mongering of the day. I had just seen the Snopes article saying that it was false, so I posted the link. I added that I looked forward to next right wing fear-mongering post from the guy. He unfriended me.
Lost two “friends” over constantly posting Snopes links to counter their bullshit. One person posted the same crap three times in a month and got a Snopes link countering it each time. The first two times she deleted the post, the last time she unfriended me.
Not bothered in the slightest. Not like they were real friends. And hey, if you want to insist that nasty things are true in YOUR personal universe that are not even remotely true in the real universe, then I don’t have time for your delusional hate and outrage anyway.
In the early days of the Internet, one of my office colleagues would always circulate e-mails that she’d received about missing children, even if they were clearly out-of-date or inaccurate.
I sometimes could find a snopes link for her e-mails showing that it was a hoax or out-of-date. She would stop circulating that e-mail, but the next one that came along, she’d circulate. She would say to me “But what if it is true - isn’t is better to circulate these descriptions just in case? If my little guy were missing I’d want to do everything possible!”
Then for one of her e-mails, that had a “call this police department number if you have any information,” I went to the police department’s webpage and found a page referring to the fake e-mail, with an explanation that they had had to dedicate an officer solely to responding to telephone calls from all over North America responding to the fake e-mail. They made the point that was one police officer who was not on the streets doing real work protecting children, but simply responding to a hoax. For a small police department, that was a major resource loss.
I showed that page to my colleague, and finally the e-mails stopped coming.
When I see shit like that I just post the Snopes link with no reply. I don’t think I’ve ever been unfriended because of it. My friends expect stuff like that from me.
My Dad’s wife forwards glurge constantly. Usually of the “repost if angels are watching over you” or “share if you love your granddaughter” variety, in which case you just scroll down. If it’s an obvious fake story of the “click like and Facebook will donate $10 for this girl’s cancer treatment” variety, then I’ll give her the snopes link.
It will actually be almost twice as big as the moon, 6787 kilometers in diameter, the same size it always is. It’s a lot further away though. It’ll look like a dot in the sky.
My MIL told me she gets so tired of her extended family posting hateful political nonsense on facebook.
Then within a week she sent me an email saying that August was going to be the first month*** in 834 years*** that would have *five *Saturdays, *five *Sundays and *five *Mondays! :smack:
Re: my OP - I didn’t use either butter or salt to change the emotional tone of my original comment, just posted the facts: 11 year old story, and here is the Snopes link that pretty conclusively proves that the story is false. Perhaps it’s a trifle cold, but I didn’t say “neener, neener” either.
And later the same day I got an answer to my comment, which (somewhat to my surprise) proved that my cousin read the entire Snopes link. She replied that there is one small grain of truth (that Starbucks does not include any soldier organizations in their regular charities) and thanked me for clarifying.
I see no reason to hold back on something like this which is a factually incorrect statement. I’ll do it politely and helpfully, but if someone wants to unfriend over that, they’ll have done me a favor.
If it’s an opinion “I’m voting for Trump” or “Bacon is my new health food!” then I’m going to let it slide. If I challenged every opinion I disagreed with, I’d never get anything done.
But it’s this kind of nonsense that drove me off Facebook in the first place. I would talk about signal to noise ratio, but it’s all noise. Facebook could be populated by first-generation chat bots for all I know.
My fault is that I tend to explain, forgetting that most people only read the first few words of any post. Unless there’s a title, in that case, they read only the title. I’ll try to follow your example from now on.
The tack they take with me when trying to argue with a Snopes rebuttal is that Snopes isn’t reliable, the Mikkelsons are being paid to do this, they aren’t authorities, they started out as nothing but Usenet posters, etc., attacking the source rather than the rebuttal. The more canny arguers pull a link out of The Repository of Lost Legends, not realizing that by doing so the joke’s on them.
In the end, though, they simply get frustrated with arguing about it, defriend you so you can’t interfere, and continue to spread the same stuff. In some cases they try to preempt a Snopes rebuttal by posting that they did a Snopes search and the story came back 100% accurate. People will do anything to avoid being disabused of something they really, really want to believe is true because it confirms their worldview.
I got to debunk a claim in person the other night after doing it earlier on Facebook.
I mean, seriously? Helium beer? That is, beer carbonated with helium, with each swallow leading to a change in your voice? It doesn’t make sense. But kudos to Sam Adams for a clever video.
The poor guy who was telling me and my friends about it was a true believer and wanted to hunt down a six-pack regardless of cost. He had just heard about it on Facebook. He was embarrassed.