Back in the early 2000s on forums I'd spend 10 minutes cross-checking a photo against Snopes before posting it, but now my aunt forwards me a video of a talking dog with 2 million views and she just hits send without blinking. Has anyone else noticed their older relatives just don't care if something's real anymore?
I got an email last Tuesday saying my car had an urgent recall from a dealership in Phoenix. It looked super official with logos and everything, said I needed to come in by Friday. I called the actual dealership and they said it was a phishing scam, they had 12 other people call that same day about it. Has anyone else seen these fake recall emails going around?
I picked the local angle after seeing a friend share 3 fake stories in one week from some random satire site. Has anyone else stopped fact-checking for others because they just dont care anymore?
He dropped a whole slice of pizza on my living room rug, picked it up, and ate it while counting out loud. I told him that's not how science works but he said the carpet fibers made it 'cleaner than tile.' Has anyone else had to argue about food safety with a grown adult?
My aunt posted this thing on Facebook about how a new study proved that drinking lemon water cures arthritis. I mean, I'm no doctor, but that seemed way too good to be true. So I spent like 45 minutes digging into it. The website looked legit at first with a .org domain and everything, but then I noticed the author photo was clearly a computer-generated face from that thispersondoesnotexist site. The whole article had no citations, just vague references to 'researchers in Sweden' with no names or institutions. I found the exact same text copied onto three other weird health blogs with different dates. It's exhausting how much work it takes to debunk one dumb post. Has anyone else dealt with relatives who won't believe you unless you show them three independent sources?
I was scrolling through Facebook yesterday and saw a post about a new FEMA camp being built in rural Oregon. It had thousands of shares. I ran the image through a reverse search and found it was actually just a warehouse construction project in Topeka from 2011. The text was copy-pasted from a 4chan thread. Took me about 3 minutes total. Has anyone else noticed these exact same stories pop up every 4 years like clockwork?