Facebook can be a great place to spread legitimate warnings.
But it can also be just as good as spreading false ones too. These 5 warnings were not only wholly untrue, but they left many people asking themselves just exactly how people actually managed to fall for them.
There was plenty of alarmist nonsense spreading over the last few years about the Talking Angela app from Outfit7, which is an app aimed at kids featuring a talking cat.
Despite being perfectly harmless, rumours spread that it was a front for a paedophile ring, and the Angela character could detect when parents were not in the room and engage children in “sexual talk”.
But all of this nonsense was beaten by the below warning, written by someone with a bizarre misunderstanding of the fundamental concepts of video –
DO NOT DOWNLOAD THIS APP I AM WARNING YOU DO NOT DOWNLOAD THIS APP. IT IS TOTALY DANGEROUS AND DONT LISTEN TO WHAT THE MAKERS OF THE APP TELL YOU… IF U ZOOM IN HER EYES U WILL SEE A ROOM WITH A GUY IN IT, AND IT TAKES RANDOM PICTURES…. IF U WISH TO DOWNLOAD MAKE SURE U COVER UR CAMERA WITH UR FINGERS
Yes, this person claimed that you had to peer closely into the eyes of the Angela character, and you would see a man, in a room, taking photos of your children.
This warning really happened. And people really believed it. So for future reference, video cameras work one way. Just because there is a camera on your tablet, it isn’t two-way. It doesn’t mean you can see who is watching you.
When satirical website National Report posted an article claiming Facebook were setting up a “Facebook Drug Task Force” to scan posts looking for indications of drug abuse, many users went pretty frantic.
The FDTF, as they would be known, would work with the DEA, to evaluate and monitor posts made by every Facebook user, looking for indications that users were either using drugs or attempting to buy or sell them through the social networking site.
Drug users took to Twitter to warn others not to “sell drugz through fb ppl”. Whilst it is true that Facebook uses monitoring software to scan chat messages between users – specifically users who are not friends or have a large age gap – talking about “smoking some green” isn’t going to have the FDTF knocking on your door.
A Facebook spokesperson referred to the rumour as “spectacularly false”.
The article included a phone number to the fictional task force, but in true National Report style, it actually was the number of the controversial Westboro Baptist Church.
Sshh… you can’t look at me because I used the word “disseminate”
Absurd, but undeniably prolific, this rumour claimed that posting some legal sounding jargon onto your timeline announcing that no one can use or even touch the information you post somehow placed you under some obscure legal protection that supersedes any terms of service that you previously agreed to.
Only it doesn’t. Not at all. Not even a little bit.
It’s a good reminder that just because words look fancy, originate from different languages or contain 3 or more syllables, it doesn’t mean they are magic words that can protect you from all the bad things in the world.
Especially when they discuss things that have absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with Internet privacy, such as the UCC code that deals with commercial law, or the Rome Statute which is a treaty centered around international crimes like genocide.
Like it or not, the bulk of what happens to your data on sites like Facebook is decided by the legal talk you “agreed” to when you signed up for an account, and you can’t surpass that with whatever you want. Sorry.
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I have a what kinda vulnerability?
After a popular riddle when viral on Facebook with the condition that failing to answer it correctly meant you had to change your profile picture to a giraffe, a lot of people inevitably had to change their profile picture to a giraffe.
But wait, according to a warning on Facebook, changing your picture to a giraffe meant that you were now at the mercy of Facebook hackers. Apparently, according to the warning, there is a “JPEG vulnerability” that – upon changing your profile picture – would give hackers your Facebook username and password. It would also install a “backdoor” that hands over control of your computer to the criminals as well.
It’s enough to make anyone even remotely technically minded just lie down and cry. Mainly because it relied on the implication that hackers had managed to infect every picture of a giraffe on the Internet with this mysterious “JPEG vulnerability”. Sound plausible?
So yes, it wasn’t true.
They’re coming to get you now…
One popular meme that spread a few years ago was the one that asked you to change your profile picture to a cartoon of your youth, for nostalgias sake.
However, all is not as it seems according to one alarmist warning. Apparently it’s all a ruse to make it easier for pedophiles to get children to befriend them on Facebook.
Make sense to you? It doesn’t to us either.
It still went mega-viral though, primarily down to the fact that it was a warning that mentioned “Facebook” and “pedophiles” in the same sentence. That’s enough to compensate for not making any sense, it would seem.
Just because it’s a warning and it spreads on Facebook, it doesn’t mean it is true. It doesn’t mean it makes any sense, and it certainly doesn’t mean you should blindly share it.
