Kevin DeGraaf’s Blog

For what it’s worth, I’m issuing a plea to email users everywhere: if you receive a message and feel the urge to forward it along, please engage your critical thinking skills instead of blasting it out to everyone in your address book. If an email makes too-good-to-be-true promises, warns of dire consequences for failing to take some action, or spreads vicious rumors about well-known people, there’s a good chance that it’s complete nonsense. Don’t assume that something is true simply because it came to you through the series of tubes in the interwebs.

Note: In this particular blog post, I’m not really arguing against the forwarding of jokes, optical illusions, brain-teasers, tests, religious stories and the like. While such forwards are irritating to most technically-savvy users of email, what I’m really complaining about are those email chain letters that make specific, absurd, and easily debunked claims about the nature of reality.

Example #1:

REMINDER 11 days from today, all cell phone numbers are being released to telemarketing companies and you will start to receive sales calls. You will be charged for these calls! Even if you do not answer, the telemarketer will end up in your voice mail and you will be charged for all of the minutes the incoming (usually recorded) message takes to complete. You will then also be charged when you call your voice mail to retrieve your messages. To prevent this, call 888-382-1222 from your cell phone. This is the national DO NOT CALL list; it takes only a minute to register your cell phone number and it blocks most telemarketers calls for five years.

Example #2:

My name is Bill Palmer, founder of Applebees. In an attempt to get our name out to more people in the rural communities where we are not currently located, we are offering a $50 gift certificate to anyone who forwards this email to 9 of their friends. Just send this email to them and you will receive an email back with a confirmation number to claim your gift certificate.

Example #3:

Back in 1969 a group of Black Panthers decided that a Black man named Alex Rackley needed to die. [...] Rackley was first tied to a chair. Safely immobilized his “friends” tortured him for hours by, among other things, pouring boiling water on him. When they got tired of torturing Rackley Black Panther member Warren Kimbro took Mr. Rackley’s outside and put a bullet in his head. [...] How in the world do you think that these killers got off so easy? Well, maybe it was in some part due to the efforts of two people who came to the defense of the Panthers. These two people actually went so far as to shut down Yale University with demonstrations in defense of the accused Black Panthers during their trial. [...] O.K., so who was the other Panther defender? [...] The other Panther defender was, like Lee, a radical law student at Yale University at that time. She is now known as The Smartest Woman in the World. She is none other than the unofficial Democratic candidate for U.S. Senate from the State of New York - our lovely First Lady, the incredible Hillary Rodham Clinton. [...] And now, as Paul Harvey said; You know the rest of the story. Pass this on! This deserves the widest possible press. Also remember it when she runs for President.

All three of these letters either made it to my inbox directly, or were submitted to me for analysis. All three are, to put it gently, crap. The offer mentioned in Example #2 is ludicrous on its face. Example #1 is a well-intentioned, plausible-sounding warning, but it, too, is false. Example #3 is not only fabricated, but a disgusting personal attack.

A little bit of Googling will reveal the truth about these deceptive emails. In particular, I’d like to mention the excellent Urban Legends Reference Pages (a.k.a “Snopes”) website. This site contains an enormous repository of refuted hoaxes, including the three I mentioned: cell phones, Applebee’s, and Hillary. If you receive a suspicious email, verify its claims against Google and Snopes. It will almost certainly turn out to be garbage, and you should delete the email and/or set the sender straight.

The latter myth deserves further commentary. I am aware that several of my readers are die-hard Republicans who passionately loathe Hillary Clinton. Although I am not a Republican, I am not a Democrat either (as explained elsewhere, I am a Libertarian) and I’m not a fan of Hillary’s policies. However, when presented with blatantly-false trash-talk about someone, I feel compelled to stand up for the truth and protest the spread of bald-faced lies.

It’s one thing to vote Republican because you have given serious thought to a wide range of issues (not just abortion and gay marriage) and have come to honest conclusions, but it’s quite another to deepen an existing hatred of a Democratic candidate based on a completely fabricated story. It’s even worse to spread such misinformation, uncritically, due to a strong confirmation bias.