06/ 23/ 2006
by Reid Goldsborough
If you've been on the Internet for any period of time, you've no doubt received alarming e-mails from well-meaning friends and relatives about some dire threat or another to your health or safety. You've probably seen similar warnings on blogs and in online discussion groups and chat rooms.
Examples of these alarms include:
- If you don't disinfect canned goods before opening them, you can get poisoned by residue from deadly rat droppings.
- A gang of kidnappers at malls and amusement parks are abducting children by taking them into bathrooms, drugging them, dyeing their hair, changing their clothes and smuggling them out exits disguised as the opposite sex.
- If you use pancake mix beyond its expiration date, you and your family members will risk a life-threatening allergic reaction from mold that can grow in it.
- Beware of car thieves in parking lots who render victims unconscious with ether-laced perfume.
You may know that warnings like these are almost always hoaxes. The chances of them being untrue increases if the warning includes lots of words in capital letters and sentences that end in exclamation marks, claims to be urgent, uses the words "this is not a hoax," asks you to forward the warning to everyone you know or comes from a stranger.
The 14-year-olds behind all this—or the people who think like them—do Internet mischief to feel important. It's the online equivalent of spray painting graffiti on the side of a school building at night. Still, otherwise sophisticated people can and do get taken in by these ruses, and time is wasted having to respond and reassure.
One tactic is to simply direct people to one of the many Web sites designed to debunk hoaxes, rumors, gossip, urban legends, old wives' tales, scams and other disinformation.
The best and best known of these sites is Snopes.com, which has been up and running for more than 10 years now. It was set up just as the Internet was becoming popular in 1995 by David and Barbara Mikkelson, a husband-and-wife team from Thousand Oaks, Ca.
The site takes its name from the family of characters who appear throughout William Faulkner novels, with "Snopes" initially being the handle that David Mikkelson used when he first became active in Usenet discussion groups in the late 1980s. Supported by relatively unobtrusive, pop-under ads and donations, Snopes.com is excellent example of Internet entrepreneurship that also serves a valuable societal purpose. The Mikkelsons make it clear that they don't expect visitors to accept them as the ultimate authority on any given topic. They include references to support their conclusions in debunking false claims.
Other Web sites that serve a similar purpose worth checking out include Don't Spread That Hoax! and Hoax-Slayer. Still other sites have been active in the past, but haven't been updated lately, a common Web phenomenon, including the U.S. Department of Energy's HoaxBusters, Vmyths.com and Common E-mail Hoaxes.
If you go to Computer Hoaxes, you'll see an advertisement having nothing to do with the subject brought to you by an outfit who bought the domain name of the now defunct site—a bit of a hoax in itself.
One of the most common Internet hoaxes involves false warnings about computer viruses. The most actively updated sites that debunk such claims come from anti-virus software vendors, such as Symantec's page.
Some people suspect that virus hoaxes, and viruses themselves, are sometimes cooked up by anti-virus software companies to boost sales. But there is no evidence of this happening, making this another Internet urban legend.
Internet hoaxes go with the territory. They're part of Internet culture—one side of the Internet's sordid underbelly. Though the Internet is a revolutionary communications medium, and it can reveal useful, factual information you'd be hard-pressed to find elsewhere, you have to be careful. Because it's so easy to put information on the Web, it's just as easy to find false information.
Other Web sites can help in building skills to evaluate the reliability of any information you find on the Internet, with college library sites leading the way here. A good one is "A Guide to Critical Thinking About What You See on the Web" from Ithaca College.
Reid Goldsborough is a syndicated columnist and author of the book Straight Talk About the Information Superhighway. He can be reached at reidgold@netaxs.com or http://members.home.net/reidgold.
