The Pitters' Place

Right now I'm specifically pissed off about someone stealing a popular Reddit comment about helping a homeless teenage mother, attributing it to Keanu Reeves, attaching a photo of him and his teenage goddaughter and making it go viral on their Keanu fanpage which is full of similarly plagiarised clickbait and has over 50,000 followers (they had half a mil, but I got them taken down and they had to start over HAHAHAHAHA), but this applies to everything. People just make stuff up and suddenly it's all over the internet. And sometimes people get harmed as a result of that misinformation or get convinced that all kinds of bizarre conspiracy theories are true.

I appreciate Snopes a lot. I introduced my grandpa to it a few years back, and then he stopped sending me chain mail about Obama being the Antichrist.

Snopes is seriously a godsend.

I don't know how many times I have sent my aunty Snopes links but she will not stop.

Snopes is part of the conspiracy.

Many, many people believe that.

Is there a website for fact-checking Snopes? There ya go.

It's turtles all the way down.

lololol

I don't know how many times I have sent my aunty Snopes links but she will not stop.

I know that feeling. I had an aunt who did that too, and I ended up sending a lot of frustrated replies about how all that stuff was WRONG that got my mother telling me off for rudeness.

Some of it was harmless, but others were offensive stuff like "email this to all the ladies in your life!!11" followed by a bunch of Ways to Not Get Raped, which she apparently thought was a good idea to send to me. Or some fear-mongering email about a dangerous spider epidemic in (insert your country) that bit somebody and LOOK AT WHAT HAPPENED TO HER FACE and there's a photo of someone who google said was disfigured in a car accident or something that was not a spider.

She no longer emails me though, so maybe the rudeness helped. She's a really nice (and sadly gullible) person and I don't like to yell at her, but it's terrifying to be reminded of that part of the internet that exists in sinister emails done up in colourful comic sans with animated gifs that tell you to send this to 5 people and your wishes will come true.