How to avoid being victim of an internet hoax

Well, you can start by reading this great piece from The Independent.

The story outlines internet hoaxes and the culture that surrounds them. Many examples are cited.

From a web culture standpoint, my interest in the story starts here:

“But there’s an equally strange phenomenon occurring on the web these days: a profound disbelief that things are what they claim to be. Wary of being seen as gullible, people simply assume that everything is fake.”

So true. And that fear of being gullible has led to a culture of skeptics who proclaim ‘Fake!’ in comments sections across the web, as the author points out.

“…we desperately want to be part of the savvy group who can look upon the poor, confused idiots who have been taken in with a degree of smugness and self-satisfaction. But that desperation has led to the cry of “Fake!” being heard everywhere.

The “comments culture” of websites these days makes it a piece of cake to accuse people of fakery, and you see it all over the internet – from videos of sleight-of-hand (“Fake!”) to first-person accounts of alien abduction (“Fake!”), and from previously unseen photos of terrorist atrocities (“Fake!”) to claims of astounding success on gambling sites (“Fake!”).

There’s very little you can do when someone shouts “Fake!” at you, other than say, “No, it’s true, really” – but by that time your detractor will long since have disappeared into the ether, along with his or her staunchly held beliefs. They don’t seem to have grasped that shouting a highly sceptical “Fake!” at everything doesn’t make them an independent, intelligent thinker – it actually means that they’ve lost the ability to be sceptical about voices of scepticism.”

It’d be interesting to know how this form of skepticism translates to everyday life. Do people yell ‘Fake!’ at the television for example? How about the newspaper?

The articles mentions, and I also recommend, snopes.com as one way to get to the bottom of internet scuttlebutt.