Please stop falling for facebook hoaxes
I’m on facebook. Mostly so I can keep up with friends and relatives that live far away and to keep tabs on which of my ex-girlfriends still look hot.
People who either have no friends or take themselves far too seriously often tell me how silly facebook is and make it clear how proud of themselves they are for not participating, but the ability to maintain a relationship — even a distant and electronic one — with people I’d otherwise just not be able to stay connected with — makes it worthwhile for me. I’m not even going to pretend that I have any plans to delete my facebook account. I’m not going to do it.
That said, it can be really, really tiresome, and no, I’m not talking about the people who bombard you with their tin-foil hat politics, their silly religious postings (Broncos win! God is good!), or their endless, endless, endless pictures of their kids.
All of that I can live with.
What bothers me most, are all the really dumb fake things that people post.
Yesterday my cousin posted a right-wing rant that was titled “I’m 83 and tired”, allegedly written by Bill Cosby.
It was a long diatribe complaining about poor people, Arabs, drug users and kids who have tattoos, and I didn’t need to look it up to know instantly that there was no way it came from Bill Cosby.
But I looked it up, and sure enough, it was written by a former senator from Massachusetts names Robert A. Hall. Except it was called “I’m 63 and tired”. Bill Cosby is 76, so I’m not even sure where the number 83 came from.
This came a few weeks after an essay on school shootings, attributed to Morgan Freeman, showed up on my timeline shortly after the Sandy Hook tragedy.
It was a well-written piece, but again, I knew instantly that Morgan Freeman didn’t write it. He issued a denial after the piece had floated around facebook for a day or two.
George Carlin has been “credited” with numerous essays, poems, etc., some of which even predate facebook, like ‘The Paradox of Our Time’. Jerry from Jerry’s Auto Sales in Lennox actually read that one — and credited it to Carlin — in one of his corny radio spots. These are also all fake.
Don’t even get me started on photos like these (the latter of which I’m pretty sure is from the movie ‘The Day After Tomorrow’), or scams like this guy below, who got a ridiculous amount of people to think he won the Powerball and was gonna share it with a random facebook user.
There’s worse, of course — the crazies who still think anyone wants to hear about Barack Obama’s birth certificate, or the ones who want us to believe George W. Bush orchestrated 9/11.
Or the ones that ‘prove’ God exists, or the ones about the five-year-old who used his father’s gun to fight off seven intruders, or the ones with your made up statistics about whichever right or left wing talking point you’re selling.
Anyway, please. Stop. These things are fake. All of them. Stop posting them on your facebook page. It makes you look like a sap.
