Snopes Before You Share: Post-Disaster Internet Rumors
Ever heard of Snopes? If not, I urge you to Google it and start to use it to vet stories and photos that fill up your Facebook feed. Don’t want to use Snopes? No problem, the internet has a variety of mechanisms in place to help you to validate the authenticity of the information on your news feed. Find one that suits you best but please find one. And yes, you are likely guilty of sharing inaccurate information — I have seen proof of it on my Facebook news feed and yes, you my Facebook friends, have been guilty many, many times.
Typically this information is harmless and often times humorous. For instance, check out this shark that was seen swimming down the highway in Houston, Texas during the May 2015 floods. Crazy — right? Even more crazy is that the same shark swam down the same highway in New York City after Superstorm Sandy in 2012 and Puerto Rico after Hurricane Irene in 2011. That shark gets around!!!
While the shark example is funny, there are others much less funny. A couple of examples include:
A report by Smithsonian Magazine article suggests that of 8 million tweets sent out in the days following the Boston Marathon Bombing, just 20% were accurate pieces of information. Put another way, 80% of the information was inaccurate. Check out the whole article here.
After the first positive case of Ebola in the United States, social media went crazy. In Iowa, the Department of Public Health had to engage in rumor control to manage false reports of a positive patient in the state. Additionally, other public health officials had to dispel inaccurate information on how Ebola could be spread. Time has a great piece on social media and Ebola that can be found here.
FEMA has begun to dedicate a site of their webpage to manage rumors during federal disaster declarations that began during Superstorm Sandy. It was their version of snopes.com — a way to vet information in a very user friendly true or false format.
And that is a great job by FEMA but in times of disasters and other incidents public safety officials have extremely important missions. Do your part to help them manage internet rumors by taking a minute to make sure the information you share is accurate.
And remember….
