The Statistical Truth Factory

The Internet is a dangerous place and no place is more dangerous than Facebook, but people don’t realize it.

Every day I go there [I hate it, but I go anyway. I know, that’s my bad] and I see the memes that people slavishly repost and repost, sometimes just with a thoughtless click and sometimes with their own opinions thrown in. About 90% of the time, a five-second search on Google can turn up the evidence to debunk whatever ‘TRUTH’ said meme is disseminating in the form of a poignant photo or a snappy graphic or a falsely attributed quotation.

Yet, no one bothers to check this stuff before they repost. They just bob their heads like bobbleheads and go ‘yup, yup, yup’ and post, spreading the work of trolls who aren’t ‘telling it like it is’ but telling it the way they want people to believe it is.

Today I saw a meme with two ‘satellite’ images of the earth. One supposedly from 1975 when the atmosphere was pristine and pure, and one supposedly from 2013 when the world was covered with a dense fog of pollution. Yup, yup, yup.

But on closer [and not even that close] inspection, it’s clear that the second photo is the MOON with an enlarged picture of the US superimposed over it/under it in Photoshopped layers so the craters look like wispy strands of pollution.

People reposted and reposted and reposted as evidence that we are destroying the planet.

Now, I’m an environmentalist, and I have no doubt that true satellite images might show a definite increase in pollution over the years, but jeez, trolls – there’s not anything better or more true out there to illustrate your point?

Or, is the point of these trolls that people are so easily fooled and brainwashed you can show them a poorly Photoshopped photo of the moon and they will believe it’s earth because you say it’s earth?

Sad. Very, very sad.

I have half a mind to create my own meme about why you shouldn’t believe everything you read on Facebook just because someone made a shiny graphic out of it. [And I actually did make one - seen above. I posted it to my wall. Let's see how many people repost it. Maybe it will go viral and The Statistical Truth Factory will become famous!]