Almost everyone has a friend or two that sends them story links that are questionable.
More often than not the message is ignored, or the person who receives the message gently tries to convince the sender the message is bogus.
“No Jason, rubbing that on my head will likely not convince my bald spot to leave.”
The same phenomenon is often seen on social media.
I can pretty much guarantee that if you share a story on Facebook that says you might get millions of dollars if you share it with someone else, you will not be given a red cent.
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Sorry ever-gullible old high school friend.
The urban dictionary defines the term snope as: “To use knowledge gained from an urban legend website or other research to administer a firm rebuke to people who chronically forward junk to your inbox. This action may involve hitting the reply-all button (public snoping).”
Snope can also be used as a verb that indicates checking the validity of a suspected story.
For instance: “Jason told me a story about how Fred Rodgers from Mr. Roger’s Neighborhood used to be a Navy Seal during the Vietnam War, but I snoped it and the story is just an urban legend.”
The most popular website people use to check if such stories are fact or fiction is snopes.com.
Staff at snopes.com try to get to the bottom of rumours or urban legends circulated by people online.
In the archives are hundreds of rumours the site has verified, discounted or explained why the rumour is only partially true. On this site are numerous postings about food and food production.
The site is not compressive or infallible, but it can be used to quickly see if a story, which isn’t worth looking too deeply into, is even in the ballpark of being true.
To test the site, I added the headline “Toddlers killed more Americans than terrorists in 2015,” which happened to appear in my Facebook wall.
Snopes had already looked into the claim with the caveat that it didn’t know exactly what constitutes a “toddler” or a “foreign terrorist” and which criteria counted toward attaining those totals in the claim.
However, they rated the claim as true:
“Broad counts indicate that 21 toddlers shot and killed themselves or others in 2015; 19 Americans died at the hands of potential or suspected Islamic terrorists,” the site stated.
I likely won’t be using the site to publicly snope any of my social media friends, but I will kindly send them links to help them remember that just because something is on the internet doesn’t mean it’s true.
