Facebook is full of information, both useful and fraudulent. The beauty of the forum is that is allows friends who live a great distance from each other to stay in touch without the cost of dialing long distance. The ease of access generally results in greater frequency of contact than would otherwise be practiced. I have been able to reconnect with old friends from all schools and the military.
You can also find great humor in posts and some memes or links as well as informative articles of all stripes, from news to political to sports and so on.
Unfortunately, Facebook is also a big perpetrator of hoaxes and lies.
By this, I don't mean the company, but the users of the website.
These hoaxes wax and wane with time. They used to be the sort of hoax that was sent via email. You know the kind that says something to the effect that Bill Gates is giving away $5000 to anyone who forwards an email or warnings of headlight flashing at cars without theirs on indicates some gang initiation activity. There are too many for me to list here, and I don't have any interest in doing so anyway.
But there's a particular hoax that persists on Facebook and it goes like this:
Hello to all of you who are on my list of contacts of Facebook. I haven't wanted to do this, but after finding all of my photos located on another site, I would like to ask a favor of you…. You may not know that Facebook has changed its privacy configuration once again. Thanks to the new “Graphic app”, any person on FB anywhere in the world can see our photos, our “likes” and our “comments”. During the next two weeks, I am going to keep this message posted and I ask you to do the following and comment “DONE”. Those of my friends who do not maintain my information in private will be eliminated from my list of friends, because I want the information I share with you, my friends, to remain among my friends and not be available to the whole world. I want to be able to publish photos of my friends and family without strangers being able to see them, which is what happens now when you choose “like” or “comment”. Unfortunately we cannot change this configuration because FB has made it like this.
1. So, please, place your cursor over my photo that appears in this box (without clicking) and a window will open.
2. Now move the cursor to the word “Friends”, again without clicking and then on “Settings”.
3. Un-check “Life Events” and “Comments and Like”. This way my activity with my family and friends will no longer be made public.
4. Now, copy and paste this text on your own wall (do not “share” it!). Once I see it published on your page, I will uncheck the same.
It is understandable that people want to protect their privacy from the online world (the absolute best way to do this is not to be on social networking sites at all, or even the internet). But the information provided in the instructions are false and do not accomplish what they say.
There are many websites that explain this, hoax-slayer.com, snopes.com, urbanlegends.about.com, and many others. Additionally, some folks address these sort of things in their blogs. Kind of like I'm doing I guess.
I don't think it benefits anyone to be a propagator of hoaxes and lies, so whenever one of my Facebook friends posts this, I usually respond with a post that lets them know it's a hoax and an accompanying link.
Despite these efforts, I still see people - in the very same thread where I posted the correcting information - stating they have done what the hoax said to do.
In fact, today someone posted it and I let him know it was a hoax with a verifying link to hoax-slayer.com.
His response to me was:
It may or may not work.... please follow instructions and do it anyway, if by any chance it could minimize the possibility of someone I don't want viewing my items, I would like to take that chance.
So, in other words, he believes the lie over the information I provided him.
I thought about unfriending him. I actually know his parents better than him - the last time I saw him he was just a kid and I was a teenager.
Then I considered messaging his dad to ask him if he knew he raised an idiot. But I thought that rather harsh and did not do it.
Then his mother posted in the same thread, "Done."
In other words, she followed his misleading instructions.
Even after I told him they are a hoax.
Even after I told everyone who reads his thread they are a hoax.
Do you see what we are up against today?
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