The only thing more perplexing than the reasons why Facebook hoaxers constantly conjure up silly time wasting rumours to spread across the social networking site is the curious viral success their unoriginal drivel seems to enjoy. It seems the same moronic, illogical nonsense circulates every few weeks across sites like Facebook, MySpace and Twitter, only slightly repackaged, which apparently is enough to fool everyone. All over again.
Take, for example, such a classic like the rumours purporting a soon-to-be-introduced charge for using Facebook, of which several hundred variants have circulated over the years, the most recent being in the last few days. Common sense would, or should, immediately dismiss these rumours as fabricated garbage since you needn’t require a business degree to figure out Facebooks business model, which relies almost entirely on marketing the information it gains from its epic user base, would fail if a mandatory charge was introduced, especially with 101 other free-to-use social networking sites lurking around the corner looking to grab Facebooks global number 2 spot. If that isn’t enough, the first several rumours purporting a charge for Facebook have all inevitably proven untrue, with their proposed dates having been and gone some time ago. Yet new messages are born, preaching the same nonsense but with different words and different dates, and the social networking collective tremble in fear once again because hey… didn’t we mention? … different words and different dates!
Its official. signal at 12:20 it even passed on tv. Facebook will start charging this summer.If you copy this on your wall your icon will turn blue and facebook will be free for you. Please pass this message if not your count will be deleted. p.s, this is serious the icon turns blue, So please put this as your status!
This latest version claims Facebook will start charging in the summer, but if you copy and paste a message to your status, your account will be remain free. An insult to intelligence, but this latest variation has fooled many, many thousands.
It begs the question – why are we so slow to pick up on digital nonsense? If someone told you that runner beans does actually make you faster, we’d engage the brain and realise that it wasn’t really true. If you weren’t particularly smart, you’d eat lots of runner beans and soon come to the same conclusion. In the real world, such a rumour, or myth even, is easy to dismiss, but we’re failing with the digital counterparts, on both accounts – we’re not engaging the brain, and we’re not learning from the past. We are blindly circulating the same regurgitated rubbish over and over, panicked and bewildered, muttering extremities yet not mulling it over even long enough to realise we’re actually making fools out of ourselves and the crap we’re circulating is essentially saying – without a hint of sarcasm, mockery or cynicism – “Eating runner beans will make me faster!”.
They really won’t.