It seems that late summer is one of the busiest seasons for email forwarding. People forward jokes, photos, inspirational stories, and political content to their friends.
Before you send that forward on to a friend or family member make sure to check it out at www.Snopes.com . Snopes is a database of all email that gets forwarded around the world.
The folks and Snopes work extra hard to research the truth (or untruth) behind each story they are sent.
When someone sends me a forwarded story that I find suspicious such as how the government is going to start charging for email or about how kindergardens across the country are going to take the book "D is for Dog" out of their schools because "dog" spelled backwards is "god", I head directly to Snopes.
If I find that the story is untrue then I send a nice message back to the sender that says something like, "Thank you for sending me a message that you thought was important. However, in the future please look the story up at Snopes.com to find out whether the story is true. I have attached a link to the reasearch about the story you sent."
I include the link to the Snopes article in hopes that they will forward my email to the people who they originally sent the story to. This almost never works, but if it helps even one person learn to research what they find in their email box, it's worth it.
Comments are closed.