To share or not to share

A man recently posted a screen munch of a conversation he had with a friend where she was defending him against someone that was apparently maligning him. The friend’s response was that she would go to Nigeria, get Ebola and come back and spit on the person that dissed him. 

I don’t respond to this kind of crap but my reaction to it was, first of all Nigeria has about 100 million people and there were only 20 reported cases of Ebola, so this woman would have to travel to Nigeria, find the 20 victims, interact with their saliva, faeces or blood and then come back and spread the disease. 

This misguided and completely ignorant post was re-posted hundreds of times. 

Then there was the man who posted on Facebook that: NASA confirms 60 hours of darkness for November and people re-posted this many times as well. 

Again, my reaction was: let’s think about the science here. The Earth is in orbit around the sun; it has had a rotational spin for gazillions of years and we’ve had pretty regular day/night, day/night… so statistically it’s not like a coin toss or the roll of the dice.

We have pretty accurate data supports of 12 hours of day and 12 hours of night. Of course NASA never confirmed this, it was a complete hoax, but people didn’t read this and re-posted anyway. 

People are either bored or just plain lazy when they just post and re-post willy-nilly for the sake of it. And these things go viral and if people are told things long enough or in this case read it often enough it becomes their narrative. 

For me, if you come across an article you think you want to share then read it and make sure the content is solid. The fact is, you can contextualise this information anyway. If you pick up the Hello Magazine at the hairdresser while having your roots done and read an article about Lady Gaga’s new wig, you might probably just flip through it because you know the source. 

And you can pick up another publication – let’s say the transcript for East Coast Radio News Watch, and think whatever I read here is going to have some substance, it’s going to be fairly well researched, so let me share this… 

Just be a little more circumspect about whether you share or not… 

You can email Terence Pillay at [email protected] or follow him on Twitter on @terencepillay1 and interact with him there.  

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