Why do people send those chain Emails?
There are several reasons chain messages keep perpetuating.
1. There's never a shortage of new people on the net, and they haven't yet learned about all the different forms chain letters take, how absurdly abundant they are and how they can play on every emotion humanly possible just to keep replicating. So they may have some excuse in the very beginning for re-sharing that canned friendship message, pseudo-religious feel-good glurge, or even that scary Nutrasweet story that looks so for real. Little do they know it and others like it started out as spoof news on a humor site and somebody thought it would be cool to re-share it without telling everybody its origin.
But no excuse holds up for long.
Memes, no matter how cute the picture or sweet they might seem, or how pleading the wording, apparently touching the story, amazing the technology, are still bogus, manipulative wastes of time and emotion. Closer looks at what passes for internet profundity may show it is anything but.
Memes cannot grant them wishes, good luck, love and kisses, or friendship blip just like that for sending them on to anyone. They cannot literally or by any means, grant wishes any more than blowing out a birthday candle can. This, besides the fact it is a honking lie, is why Bill Gates won't send them millions of dollars abracadabra style as soon as they've hit that forward/share button. amusing to them. They have no interest in stopping the spread of annoying jokes, animations and video link memes that circulate. Stories, including those put into chain letters, are very effective in getting people's emotions aroused,
People also have a tendency to believe the unbelievable. It's why absolutely nasty repulsive, even racist hoaxes such as your pet on your plate in Chinese restaurants, from the animal rights people, and human fetus soup in China from the anti-abortion extremists, still circulate, and why news outlets sometimes get taken in by hoaxes like the vengeful dentist story.
2. As memes continue circulating, they also continue to mutate. Stats and names may change from one version of a hoax to a newer version.
Before those big hoaxes claiming Facebook was overpopulated and was about to deactivate your account or would start charging its users came along, they squealed out false warnings that Yahoo, MSN, Instragram, Deviantart, Hotmail, Bebo, Skype, crunchyroll.com, and all other web sites were shutting down. In addition, they tell you that your favorite place on the net is just crawling with hackers trying to add you as a friend to steal your account, information and your computer.
The scheme is always the same. "Forward this around to enough people and Yahoo/AOL/Facebook/Twitter/Bebo etc. won't start charging you, you could be saving the world (or at least your computer) from hackers and your account wouldn't get deactivated!"
It's the same with the "Facebook/Yahoo/AOL/etc. will start charging its users! Share this far and wide to stop it!" Meme spam.
Codswallop!
The sleazy tabloid and therefore fake news site Weekly World News doesn't just print trashy lying tabloid junk, it also starts and restarts chain letters. The March 2012 mutations of the "Facebook is charging its users!" and "Facebook is shutting down!" chain letter hoaxes are the fault of Weekly World News.
March 15 came and went, and no shut-down or charges on users' accounts.
Once again, the Weekly World News restarted the hoax, simply moving the date from March 15 to July 15, 2012, causing more unnecessary alarm..
Also, there are no applications and no way for Facebook to let you know who and how many people look at your profile, nor will sharing and liking anything make you any money.
Another chain letter scam showed up in early June 2012. This one pretends, with very official looking language, that you can simply stop FB from publishing anything you want to keep private, by simply sticking the stupid note on your profile.
Buttkiss. The only thing that does is prove you re-share memes.
The sick kid hoaxes do the same thing. Jessica Mydek became Amy Bruce, who became Tamara Martin and a host of other ficticious sick kids with the same ficticious plight, and the very same wording from mutation to mutation of these particularly tasteless hoaxes.
The words of copyrighted stories and speeches get changed, "Share or else you're a terrible person!" implied or said directly get added. Real authors get stripped of credit for their own work while others get their names wrongly attributed. Anonymous quotes get associated with the names of famous people who did not say or write them.
3. Some people try getting others to junk up the net with memes upon request. This type of trolling and spam replication is often in the form of a question posed to look like innocent curiosity. Take this Redit example. There are countless questions on Yahoo Answers like this as well. Some people take the bait and repost chain letters or at least give a brief description of the supposedly horrifying ones they've read. Others don't play, choosing to respond with hoax-quelling rationality instead, by pointing out that chain letters are stupid, fake, lame, annoying, anything but scary or true. Unfortunately, too many of those use anti-chains, which just add to the problem because they are actually a type of meme.
4. Newbies or not, regardless of education or intellect, some people, even after they have been told about the problems with chain letters, they just don't heed the message to stop, choosing to go on sharing the next nonsense or only partly true meme to arrive in their mail, on their social network space, and in the blogosphere. They still don't stop to question its validity, research to see if the story is true, check the web to see if that same cute pic has been posted to many other forums, and they have no inkling how often and how many other people may have already reposted or emailed that same meme or something similar into their friends' inboxes or so that it shows up as activity in a social network news-feed.
In addition, no one is completely immune to getting duped by hoaxes, not even the most jaded netizens. That is why new or initially unrecognized mutations of old hoaxes sometimes can still get you.
Such was the case of the Houston Press bloggers. They were taken in by a FB hoax, and in response, they wrote the article about their top 10 favourite hoaxes of all time. Number one, listed on the second page, is the Nigerian prince scam. Number 2 is the Neiman Marcus recipe hoax, one I fell for when new to the internet.
There was no massive theft of dvds from the Texas Children's cancer centre and it really makes one wonder what goes on in the sad minds of people who make up these hoaxes.
5. Some meme-lovers do not seem to remember that they had seen and shared the same meme stories, jokes, half-witty ditties etc. as last year and the year before that etc. So, they are just as in love with them as they were during the fleeting minute they were when reading the meme months ago for the second time, and a year ago when they saw it the first time. So, they re-share again.
6. The thought doesn't occur to them that they are spreading< around something that is not only upsetting or alarming, but untrue, thereby upsetting or potentially alarming others unnecessarily. After all, it came from a trusted friend who normally uses common sense, is well educated and respected, so this person wouldn't send a bogus chain letter - right?
Not necessarily. Sometimes even the most respected, educated, sensible people are taken in by hoaxes, for the same reason - trusting that if it came from their friend, it couldn't possibly be one of those bollox chain letters. .
Jana Gana Mana, the Indian national anthem gets slagged by chain letters around the anniversary of Indian's independence from Britain.
The least that happens with bogus memes is the senders end up looking like dopes while seriously annoying and embarrassing their friends.
Worse still is when people end up having their names falsely attributed to chain letters they did not write, and this goes particularly bad if the chain letter in question is nasty.
Take the chain letter Allah Or Jesus. It is another sad example of Christian disgrace.
It has mutated to the point where it wrongfully cited Canadian defence researcher Michel A. Paul as writing/originating it.
Not true.
Paul is getting harassed by hate-mail he doesn't deserve because of this chain letter.
The real culprit is Rick Mathes (that link wasn't working when I tried it) who, according to others, lied through his teeth about the training exercise dealing with differing beliefs. There was no imam there, an inmate played the role, and he didn't "hang his head in shame" with his expression turning to that of a scolded little boy and it is doubtful he was even "stumped" on something.
Worst case scenarios, upsetting people who are particularly hateful and/or gullible, making for a very dangerous combination.
I could not believe my senses when reading this article from India Times. Two people were beaten and jailed, just because one of them forwarded a chain mail cartoon that ridiculed some leader there. The other person was abused in the same manner, just for being present when the forwarding was being done.
This is NOT right, this is unacceptable, inexcusable!
There is a follow-up article but it is confusing. I'm not sure where it is claiming some of the victims of this attack didn't know about the emails, or if some of the attackers didn't.
Then, on the other end of things, it' is the meme replicators who are the victimizers, whether they set out to be or not.
Brianna Porter took something in good faith and wrote up a chain email, accusing Samuel Pickard of sex abuse, all based on some thirdhand account she heard from some sorority account. After an innocent man's life was ruined, she retracted and says she regrets sending the email and has learned from her mistake. She advises others to be very careful of what they send and to not just impulsively and blindly re-share memes. when emotion is clouding one's judgement.
Hoaxes about Muslim-persecution can and do come from the supposed victims themselves, and definitely from the left-biased, mainstream media.
7. They try to refute your debunk of their favorite memes with more memes, which also end up debunked.
Nonie Darwish did not write The Joys Of Womanhood. Unfortunately, some right-winger thought it was a good idea to repost that chain letter to a site anyone with common sense should keep away from in the first place, a feminist message board. When they shouted her down, she replied by doubling down with the chain letter posts.
Here's a brilliant entry on OneWay2day debunking the Joys of Muslim Women chain email by a Christian and a conservative, with links to resources showing what Nonie Darwish actually says.
8. They know it's a meme, even that it contains false info but don't care, believing it's so politically spot on, so darling, so inspirational, hilarious, cute, touching, tear-jerking, brain-teasing, etc. that they do exactly what it tells them - to pass it on to absolutely everybody or to some cheesily made up chosen number of people to fit their hierarchy of best chosen twelve or seven or eleven or whatever the number the meme specifies; or they figure their friends will simply be as wowed by the story or poem or funny picture, whatever it was as they themselves were, so will overlook the ridiculous threats, promises and demands in the meme to spam their friends or some place on the web. They just don't consider that not only is the meme contrived, completely untrue, and designed to get a specific reaction to make the urge to re-share kick in, but the incredibly awesome of memes has already been re-shared to countless people from countless other memers just like themselves, so, really isn't all that special.
No, much as it is longed for to have happened, neither Charles Darwin nor Crock Hunter Steve Irwin became Christians right before their deaths, at least, not in a way any meme can prove. Everything said in these memes is misinformation and third-person wishful thinking. What happened with Steve Irwin and Charles Darwin remains between them and God.
The sappy story about John Wayne isn't true either. It even gets people's names wrong. "The Duke" did become a Catholic before his death, and did write a letter to Robert Schuller's daughter, but her name is Carol, not Cindy.
Pseudo-inspirational memes (sometimes referred to as "glurge") can be especially irritating, even infuriating.
Dance In/Run Through The Rain is a perfect example. It has everything in it to push those re-sharing buttons in people's brains. A brave, precocious little girl who utterly schools every adult in the store on dropping everything to smell the roses, er, run through the rain. And she's especially brave because her dad had cancer, so if she can stay chipper, the implication is none of us have any excuse to stop whatever mundane thing we're in the middle of to turn that frown upside-down (assuming we have one in the first place), and frolic in the rain! As all too often with these sorts of tales, God's name gets dragged into it as well, making sure the Christians won't be able to resist the temptation to re-share.
The outcome is truly hokey. It is not just the girl and her mother who stop shopping to dance in the rain. Scads of adults who overhear the conversation or see the dancing craze spread throughout the crowd of customers, join in, and at the end of the story, everyone who was in the store is now running and dancing in the rain outside the shop.
5 Lessons How To Treat People is another meme that proposes to teach the readers how to treat people. There are so many memes of this type and they are incredibly annoying. For one thing, they imply that whoever sees them is in need of some kind of attitude/perspective-adjustment and the meme is the cure for that... Then there's the hokey stories, most are of a sort that would do well in a classroom for small children. If recited to an audience or put into short film form, they would be placed in the children's section of the library and received with cold "Just how simple-minded do you think we are?" from adult audiences. But put into an internet meme, an d suddenly adults just go all melty, and then the sharing happens.
The same problems mentioned above also apply, most are not true, some have details about real people they mention wrong, many sources are anonymous or falsely attributed...
9. Memes can split up friendships. They are so manipulative and powerful over some people, causing them to demonstrate an appalling value of viral content over and above the truth, their friends, and their friends' feelings. Meme-lovers can get very snarky when they learn they are not saving the world or brightening someone's day with chain letters. It's easy for them to simply ditch a friend who is honest enough to give them the straight-up on the matter.
When faced with this frustrating situation, some of us have no choice but treat habitual memers as spammers, even if these forwarders are friends, relatives, or acquaintances in real life.
So it goes on, people continue to spread memes, believing they are better and more appreciated than their own words.
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