Look Before You Post On The Wireless Internet

If something sounds true, if it's just so plausible, and it's all over the Internet and your friends' Facebook posts, it must be true, right? Maybe there is just something about seeing a piece of information written down that makes it so much more concrete, so much more believable. There have now been two very recent, very prominent examples of Internet quotes and texts that have rocketed through social networking sites and around the Internet while still being completely false. Don't people look anymore before using their wireless Internet services to post messages?

At the beginning of July, an interesting piece of information began to show up on various people's Facebook status updates around the country and even the world. Supposedly, because July 2011 had five Fridays, five Saturdays, and five Sundays, it was part of an ancient Chinese phenomenon known as money bags, and posting this on one's Facebook wall would somehow activate this outpouring of money. Despite the fact that many of these postings cited feng shui, a Chinese interior design philosophy, and the fact that many contained chain letter style warnings about the consequences on not posting this information, a surprising number of people re-posted this information as their status. In fact, this message was common enough on Facebook that the message gained news coverage as well as a permanent home on Snopes, a website devoted to debunking Internet myths.

Unfortunately for the people who were hoping to gain riches by using their wireless Internet service to take advantage of this unusual occurrence in the calendar, the first thing to know is that this doesn't come around every 800-plus years, but rather every dozen or so. Secondly, as you might have already guessed, this doesn't have the slightest thing to do with Chinese philosophy at all. The origin of this rumor still remains unclear.

One famously incorrect piece of information whose origins have been traced is the quote falsely attributed to Martin Luther King that appeared on many people's Facebook pages after U.S. president Barack Obama announced the death of Osama bin Laden. A particularly elegant formulation of the old an eye for an eye leaves everyone blind saying, a woman named Jessica Dovey combined a legitimate Martin Luther King Jr. quote with her own observations on the matter, and somehow upon re-posting and re-tweeting, Dovey's observations became attributed to King. A Clarence Darrow quote with a similar implication was also falsely attributed to Mark Twain and reposted widely after the bin Laden announcement.

What this seems to show is that with all the speed that our wireless Internet service gives us, sometimes the facts get lost in the process. It can be shocking how so many people just make snap judgments and post them on their walls using wireless Internet service, or will post information without fact-checking it. With wireless service only speeding up, this seems like a problem we will increasingly have to face in the future.