Once again, one of my Facebook friends has been tricked into posting a gross picture of a dying baby because they believe that clicking “like” or “share” on this horrible picture will somehow magically make money appear.
I pit two things here:
First, the fuckwits who think this is amusing. I’m not one to crow “think of the children” but that is (was) someone’s kid. Someone who would probably not wish to have their (probably dead) child’s picture passed around the internet in the false hopes of curing cancer. It’s salt in the wound of whomever actually knew that child and it doesn’t accomplish a goddamn thing. It’s fucking rude but disguised as something helpful, a disguise which only works because people believe everything they read on the internet.
Second, Facebook. Get with the program you assholes. Create a webpage that says “WE DO NOT GIVE MONEY TO ANYONE FOR SHARING PHOTOS OF DEAD BABIES!” Create a webpage that lists all the Facebook urban legends, current scams and what to watch out for! And ban the shitheads who spread this garbage. Seriously, this bullshit has been going on as long as Facebook has existed (and existed before Facebook in other forms). One would suppose they might be wise to it by now. One would suppose that they would at the very least vigorously protect their website against people taking up useless causes in their name. If I opened a bookstore called “Face’s Books” they’d sue me out of existence the next fucking day. But tell the whole internet that Facebook supports your stupid fucking lies and they do nothing. So they do actually end up supporting these idiots through their inaction.
Slacktivism is useless. I can understand the appeal to it. I’d certainly be willing to donate a few mouse clicks if it meant some poor kid would suffer less. But it doesn’t work that way, never has and never damn well will! No one rewards this kind of stupid behavior! No one with money cares if ten million people repost a gross picture of a dead kid. And fun as Facebook can be at times…
FACEBOOK WILL NEVER CURE FUCKING CANCER! Nobody, anywhere at any point in time has ever been saved by people clicking like, sharing a stupid and obvious urban legend or posting a gross photo of some cancerous mass on a poor kid’s face.
I fully support this pitting. May I extend it a bit to people who think that internet petitions will actually change things? Posting shit on a wall or sending emails to your entire address book (especially if the list is available for EVERYONE to see) won’t change anything except to aggravate your friends.
Sometimes focused Internet outrage has changed things. It helped kill SOPA, for example. And it convinced a lot of advertisers to pull their ads from the Limbaugh show.
But most of the re-share stuff and cut-and-post-if-you stuff is stupid, even when its sole purpose is to “raise awareness.” As if all these people on Facebook never heard of cancer of child abuse and you’re making them aware and improving the world through your two seconds of effort. It was a lot worse a couple of years ago; on any day I might see five or six different “post this as your status if you’ve ever been affected by _____” (followed by the parody ones which also became tiresome). I think even the people who used to do it are sick of it now. And there’s definitely been a sea change in attitude.
So why aren’t you also pitting your slack-addled fuckstick of a friend who apparently had their brain replaced with so much jello pudding that they believed clicking “like” or “share” on a picture was going to make money spew out of Teh Internets to cure CancerFaceBabby?
The obvious question to me whenever I see one of these is what kind of sick fuck would a person have to be to say, “I have the money or ability to save this child’s/puppy’s/goldfish’s life, but will only do so if an arbitrary number of strangers on the internet undertake an action that has no direct impact on me or anything I care about.”?
This! Especially if it’s run by a multinational corporation, like pink Yoplait lids donated to support the Susan J Komen breast cancer cause. Absolutely sick.
On a local level, I know a place where my AA club could donate the many pop tops and water bottle caps to buy a kid chemo. I think it would be nicely ironic if we donated the majority of the caps because the place collecting them is a liquor store.
Well no, not if you’re going to take that attitude! But what if they were only a few dollars away, and the reason little Jim-Jim still has cancer is because one person didn’t like, and that person was…
YOU! How would you feel then?!
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On a local level, I know a place where my AA club could donate the many pop tops and water bottle caps to buy a kid chemo. I think it would be nicely ironic if we donated the majority of the caps because the place collecting them is a liquor store.
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The only place I know of that really does take pop tops is Ronald McDonald House. It was a case of an urban legend becoming true- they started getting so many of the damned things because of the erroneous “they sell them and use it for charity” memos that they decided “why not?” and because they get so many tons of them it actually works out to over $1 million per year.
However, you could save every pop top can from now until your hundredth birthday and it might equal a few dollars. Get all the people in a neighborhood to do it for six months and it might be a hundred dollars, but probably wouldn’t be.
That’s the beauty part! Pop tops and bottle caps are worthless. Except the store claims they have collected enough for eight chemo treatments for the kid. Either the guy running the scam is buying the chemos himself and is just collecting junk to encourage community participation, or somebody drops in the occasional solid gold pop top.
Sweet. I think I have a few pop tabs too, if you need them. If everyone in the nation donated just one, week could raise . . . $128,000! (Of course shipping 200 tons of aluminum will cost more than that, but that’s not important).
