Any regular visitor to this site will be well aware that as a collective, social media users are a tad gullible.
Whilst many rumours may be rather believable, at the other end of the spectrum there are plenty of hoaxes that really should have never have gotten off the ground. Ever.
We recap on 5 rumours that, despite being so incredibly obviously fake, managed to fool some, and leave most of you lost for words.
Does the latest iOS7 operating system make your iPhone waterproof?
This was the question posed to many Twitter users in 2013 when a fancy looking diagram circulated the social media site claiming that the latest OS upgrade from Apple actually made your phone resistant to being completely submerged in water.
Well surely no one would be silly enough to entertain the idea that a software update could make your hardware phone waterproof? And no one would certainly be silly enough to drop their phone into water to test the rumour, right?
Well according to a flurry of angry Tweets, there were… as John from Canada can attest to…
Whoever said ios7 was waterproof f*** you
Rule of thumb for the future – software updates cannot effect the water resistant capability of an electronic device.
Apparently Facebook is closed “for maintenance” the last three days of February, according to an official looking notice that spreads across Facebook at the same time every year.
The people eagerly passing on the message to their friends apparently missed the joke – well, we assume it was meant as a joke.
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Can setting your profile picture to a giraffe give unscrupulous hackers complete access to your Facebook account?
Panicked Facebook users thought so, as this rumour became one of the most popular rumours of 2013, thanks to the extremely viral quiz game that asked users to change their profile pic to a giraffe if they answered a question incorrectly.
In another rumour that was sure to have some of the less evolved amongst us willingly destroy their expensive gadgets, this rumour provided such techy sounding pseudo-talk to try and convince us that microwaving your phone somehow managed to charge the battery.
Definitely a useful thing to know if you don’t have the charger to hand.
But of course sending actual micro waves to an electronic gadget with a circuit board only does one thing – it blows the circuitry up. Destroying the phone. And probably your microwave too. As many found out to their dismay.
Still dubbed one of the most outrageous hoaxes of all time, this April Fool’s joke inherited some plausibility because it was actually created and executed by software giant Google.
The claim was an app that could translate animal noises into human English. All you needed to do was to record your pet, or farm animal you happened to be driving past, whatever.
Send the recording off to the Google labs via the downloaded app, where Google would analyse the “neural biological acoustics” of the recording and send the human translation back.
According to Google, plenty of people tried it. And to add more credibility to the ruse, those who did send a recording actually received a “translation” back – albeit an entirely random one.
Remember folks, don’t believe everything you see on the Internet.
