These Things Already Helped Kill Myspace.
May 23, 2012
Social networking sites have greatly changed the way you communicate with the world, and Facebook is their undisputed king. One of the greatest things social networking has given us is the unprecedented rate in which news can travel. Unfortunately you have to take the good with the bad and Facebook has allowed complete utter bullshit to spread at an unprecedented rate. These usually manifest themselves in the form of a chain letter.
One of the most common kinds of chain letters that I’ve seen on Facebook are posts of a “sick and/or dying” child, claiming that every time the post is shared Facebook will donate a dollar to the child’s family. Let me just say this straight out. These are fake, each and every single one of them. If you see a post saying that Facebook will donate to anything they are scams and lies. Like this story about a child that apparently has a rare form of skin cancer on his face. In reality he just has a rather large strawberry birthmark, one that has since been removed and the child is doing fine.
Then there’s this story about a child that lost all his limbs in a bus accident. In reality the child lost all his limbs from contracting bacterial meningitis. If anything this story should be shared as a cautionary tale about getting your children vaccinated, but no, fuck spreading a positive helpful message, no let’s make up some buttshit about a bus accident.
So please if you see a post like this, do not share it, it’s not helping anyone, the fact that the images used in them are all misappropriated an used without the permission of the families involved it must be a little psychologically hurtful to see a picture of your child at the darkest times in their life used in such a manner.
Another type of chain letter going around that I find much more aggravating are the “National Something, Something Week” posts. These unlike the other kind of chain letters probably aren’t created for malicious purposes, but are annoying in the fact that they don’t ever have a date associated with them, so you never know if the posts are actually accurate. Someone see’s the post, likes the message and reposts it, never thinking that maybe the chronology of the post has passed it’s time. Continue ad infinitum. I swear it’s been National Mental Health Awareness Week every week for the last seven months.