PhotoDude.com

Tue. Feb 19, 2008

Don't Believe Every Email You Read, Especially Election Year

This feels a little like making a post to be certain that “you do know the sky is blue, don’t you?” But it has come to my attention that not everyone pays attention to the things that seem obvious to me.

For example, if you get a poorly formatted mass email sent to you and dozens of others, that claims things like “Obama takes great care to conceal the fact that he is a Muslim” ... “ALSO, keep in mind that when he was sworn into Office he DID NOT use the Holy Bible, but instead the Koran” and other seemingly scandalous claims, consider this: Hillary Clinton is seeking any half-assed angle she can scrounge to get back in the race, and if those things were true, don’t you think she’d be hammering on that daily? Yes, you know she would. The fact she isn’t ought to be one clue.

Then we have the lovely closing of the email: “We checked this out on ‘snopes.com’. It is Factual. Check for Yourself.” Which is actually a rather insidious ploy. If you’ve heard of snopes, and you read this person has already checked it out there, well it simply must be true! And there’s certainly no need to go verify it yourself.

However, if you do actually go to snopes.com and find a whole page on wild claims about Obama, you’ll find the email in not “factual” at all, and snopes does not confirm its contents, but rather refutes the claim Obama is a Muslim or was sworn in with his hand on a copy of the Koran.

So, if someone emails you they heard the sky was green, and that they’d looked out the window and confirmed it … you should probably still go look out the window yourself. And when you see that still blue sky, then tell your friend they might not want to spread such alarmist BS without fact-checking it first.