don't take the word of sites like Theonion.com, LightlyBraisedTurnip.com or DailyCurrant.com which are satire, tabloid, and meme-replication sites.
Once you've checked out the story and found it to be false, send the link of that verification to whoever sent/re-shared that story.
Dummy reports are annoying enough when they take up time on the airwaves.
They are also annoying when they crop up as memes.
Unlike all out 100% false stories, dummy news/info stories contain a very irrelevant grain of truth that is blared out by the headline to grab the attention of the audience, and turns out to be completely pointless and a waste of time for the listeners/readers.
This post deals with various hoaxes that are 100% false as well as the dummy reports where the grain of truth is so tiny that it doesn't matter and is only used to prop up the lies.
Manipulative old hoaxes that use slight of word (similar to slight of hand) trickery to get people re-sharing the junk in alarm, outrage, in the hopes of getting rich, you name it.
Like the friendiversary meme, these are so annoying, plus so long-debunked and full of nonsense that people have no excuse to believe and re-share, especially if they just take a moment to calm down and think a little before doing an impulse re-share/spam... And they can stop re-sharing this crud every time it recycles. Often, people who re-shared these bits of schlock one year, forgot they had at some point, and re-share them again the next time it recycles a year or two or 5 down the road.
Yeah, there is someone out there who has taken note...
These memes include:
This meme has been going around since the late 90s, and never made anyone rich through a nonexistent email tracker. The testimonies in all versions of the meme are flat out fake, and no legitimate company relies on memes to get or give away cash or anything else.
That's right, folks, Bill Gates is not giving away millions to anyone who re-shares this hoax meme.
The Whata/Happy Burger Day Hoax
Red Robin isn't giving out a free burger and sundae for a fake coupon. Read article here. The Whataaburger meme is just as false.
Nasa did not shell out billions of bucks for a space pen. The story is complete fiction.complete
Here's what happened when someone posted the meme on a site, believing in it. Negative reactions toward the posting and apparent belief in an old joke hoax chain letter that just won't die.
School Answering Machine Hoax
In text or video/mp3 form, the hoax is a recording that says it's an answering message for your school, and goes through various silly options to press buttons for, such as "Press 7 to swear at staff" "press 8 if you want us to raise your child"
One version is the Maroochydore High School Answering Machine Message Hoax, but it has named various different schools in the hoax's long-running history.
No school has such a message on their answering machine.
It's amazing that people haven't recognized this viral stunt for the old joke it is.
Here is an example of the hoax.
Shark Following Kayak: Real Picture, Phony Story
The pictures are genuine, but the meme story about a shark thankful for a fisherman saving its life, is not.
No, Pepsi and no other company is using aborted fetuses in any food products!
thenatemaxproject.com. carry on about "xionist" this and that, tout crazy conspiracy theories, belief in chem trails etc, and tell a big lie about aborted fetuses being eaten/used in food that has been debunked years ago. It will never become a true story no matter how many times it gets recycled and mutated, no matter what company gets accused.
The hysteria over the margarine. You've likely seen it, the 'margarin VS butter, which is better' shrill that goes around again and again. This is the rant that claims margarine is a molecule away from plastic and that flies won't go near it.
Margarine being a molecule away from plastic is like salt being one molecule away from being bleach since salt consists of sodium and chlorine. Margarine has the same ingredients as paint? Paint has water in it. Oh noes! Guess I should stop drinking unless my insides ingest something too close to paint.
No.
The meme is rubbish. Not even a turkey has an excuse to propagate it.
Butter VS. Margarine - myths debunked.
The meme claiming KFC can't call it chicken because they raise some kind of mutant deformed creatures for slaughter is absurd hogwash.
To start with, KFC doesn't raise any kind of stock, they get their chicken from suppliers same as any other establishment.
Red Bull and other energy drinks do not contain bull semen or dangerous chemicals. Taurine and bull semen are not the same thing at all, and though taurine is a substance produced in the large intestines of animals, humans included, the taurine in energy drinks and baby formulas is synthetic.The taurine added to cat food does come from animal intestine, but places producing cat food do not put those ingredients in human food. Products or human consumption don't get their supplies from the same facilities as the pet food industry.
There is no "right way to eat fruit" nor does it cure cancer, get rid of gray hair or whatever else that silly bogus Dr. Stephen Mark Mack chain letter claims. This chain letter manages to sound medically authoritative enough to catch anyone off guard regardless of political or religious persuasion. Here, it is reposted on a Muslim blog. And here's a debunk.
Even if you take the time to really think about it, the meme doesn't ring true. We mixx fruit and other products together all the time before it enters our bodies, and the fruit doesn't cause the rest of the food to ferment and spoil on contact with the fruit juices. Neither does that happen during digestion. If fruit was such a cancer cure, why isn't cancer eradicated? It should be with this miracle claim. But, put a mention of cancer in any chain letter and wow, people just eat it up! People love stuff about cancer.
Note to anyone eager to share neat Youtube videos on their latest new mobile or netbook/notebook/tablet - that meme about cell phone popcorn or cell phone boiled eggs - is false!
You can NOT microwave popcorn and boil eggs using cell phones!
The popcorn one was actually an advertisement for Cardo bluetooth headsets, and companies definitely have enough mula to buy very sophisticated video editing equipment and use it in conjunction to make a totally edited out the wazoo video look like an actual experiment done by the average Joe down the street.
And that's probably why so many people got sucked into the cell phone popcorn video hoax. It looks like an impromptu video made by your average set of young people, but it is very carefully put together and edited with all the camera and editing tricks liberally applied.
Another faked up video has people believing that adding hydrogen peroxide to Mountain Dew will make it glow.
Not true.
There is some hydrogen peroxide in glow liquid - along with a bunch of other stuff, and that liquid doesn't even glow on its own without the glass component being added and then broken to start the reaction.
Sorry, but something is more than a little off.. and rotten.
Wikipedia Is Not Declining!
You may have read reports online, claiming Wikipedia is losing popularity and editors are making a mass-exit. The story had spread around news sites like wild fire.
Not true.
Clubbing Fire Ants With Soda Water
Club soda won't do away with fire ant colonies, as the meme claims, and Walter Reeves never promoted this idea, disclaiming it on his site.
Aspartame/nutrasweet, Splenda/sucralose, disgusting as they are IMO, they're neither sweet poison nor ant poison. They are merely major yuck on my palet.
The anti-modern medicine, well, anti just about anything man-made contingent is not without their own set of hysterical malarkey chain letters.
Sweet Poison is an anti-aspartame chain letter that has all the wild screeching alarmist claims that make it sound as horrific as the headlight gang initiation and the hook-handed killer urban legends, and it is just as false.
It has been debunked ages ago and remains as false when recirculated to be about Splenda.
And no, aspartame isn't either. That meme came from a spoof news site.
Artificial sweeteners aren't good for you though, and I hate the aftertaste and how they burn my throat going down.
The stupid barcode meme was fallen for, hook, line and sinker on this forumIt is misleading, untrue. Pure fiction! Bollox. Bunk.
People need to stop letting memes tell them to be so terribly scared of China.
Dollar Design Problem - HOAX!
There is no new US dollar design for 2010 and beyond. Any such news would come through real news outlets, not via meme.
The images were a contest entry by Michael Tyznik, and some loser ripped them off and put them into a hoax meme.
The So Help Me God Meme
What memes won't pull to get people spreading them, including mix&match true events< to create a more pathetic sounding fictional account. exploiting religious panic, targeting Christians especially.
The So Help Me God meme is tasteless. It revisits a couple of all too real family tragedies that happened years ago, uses half of one story, mingling it with half another, and throwing in a wrong location, thereby exploiting two family tragedies as a platform to spread yet another "OH NOES! Christianity is getting killed off and we must save it with memes!" hype.
Clifford and Bernice Moody were murdered not in Raytown or Toronto, but Polk County, Florida, in 1996.
John and Mildred Caylor, the owners of a Christian book store, were murdered in Raytown Mo. not Toronto, in 2004.
The impassioned words of speaking out, written in first person, are from the Moodys' daughter back in 2005 when the killer's death sentence was upheld on appeal.
Thomas Woodel is responsible for the Moody murders, and Kellen C. McKinney is responsible for the Caylor murders. He was charged in 2004.
If you don't think that's a big deal, how would you like it if someone you loved was murdered but so was someone else, and some chain letter tried to use your story and theirs as a sad alarming viral just to get passed on and live forever? And how would you feel if you or your murdered relative kept getting mixed up with the victims in the other story?
And let's not forget the all important little gilt-trip at the beginning or tacked on to the end... "Delete and you are part of the problem"
Christian couples won't start getting killed and their children having to speak out because you didn't spread a meme.
Please, out of consideration for the families who went through these nightmares, and for truth's and your own sake, don't spread that meme.
Fake Pothole Stickers
Fake Pothole Stickers on the road. They weren't meant to slow down speeders, but were an ad campaign. That's not only crazy, but potentially very dangerous.
Meme Gangs
Gang initiation, carjacking, robbery, rape and murder hoax chain letters.
They are a nuisance not only because of their spreading of unnecessary fear and belief in stories that didn't happen, but they force real police departments to waste time, energy and effort reassuring the skittish and naive public that they were not behind these warnings and false stories.
You'd think by now everybody would be wise to the fact that memes about gang initiations and wild carjackings are just that, hoaxes, and you'd think maybe the whole stupid genre of meme would've lost its ability to churn out new duds, but NO!
But no. A positively ancient one about flashing headlight gang initiation still made the rounds in 2013, and the one about rapists luring women with crying baby sounds cropped up again in early 2014.
A real winner of a gangster hoax came out in late 2009, claiming gangs lure women out of their cars with a bloody looking baby or an infant in a car seat by the road. Gah, honestly, what sick twisted people make up this crap?
Then there's getting Egged On By Robbers - the one about The Egg-throwing Thieves
This meme, like the bloody baby/car seat by the road hoax has also spread to Hawaii in 2011.
The claim is that criminals are tossing eggs at the windshield of your vehicle to decrease your visibility so you'll slow down and be more vulnerable to attack.
No such incidents have been substantiated. The story is set in various different places around the world. Experiments were done to see if the claims of egg mixed with water from windshield wipers decreases visibility by over 90% and this claim failed the experiment.
So while it is true that disreputable people do chuck eggs at vehicles, this robbery scenario is extremely unlikely to have happened or will happen.
So listen up. Don't believe and pass on any of these forwards.
There is not, and was never any: rapist disguised as or using old ladies or children to lure women from shopping mall parking lots into danger anywhere mentioned in these chains, no Walmart gangs out for old women or mother and young child blood, no National Gang Week/Gang Initiation Week, Gang Initiations Targeting Women, Walmart//car-bumping Gang Initiation Rites, no headlight Flashing Gang/ankle-slashing gang initiations, egg-tossing car thieves just lying in wait to get you. As this post says, practice safety, but don't be paranoid, and if there were any concerns about dangerous crime operations such as the ones these chain letters go on about, any police service would use legitimate means of getting the message to you, such as posting about it on their own Facebook pages, blogs, getting the story on the news, since it would be outrageously ratings-grabby. Not via memes.
So next time someone re-shares a breathless story claiming some new-fangled gang initiation or activity is rampant, don't believe or resend it. Check it out on hoax-busting sites, and query real online news sources such as your local TV and radio stations, but even they fall victim to hoaxes. At least that will be on them instead of you then.
Super Market Child Abductionand Smuggle Via Haircut/Disguise Hoax
Nip the latest child abduction urban legend in the bud.
No little girl was kidnapped in a supermarket with her hair cut so she could be smuggled out of a country looking like a boy. No little boy was similarly abducted with a change of clothes to disguise his identity in another version of the hoax.
Don't be taken in by this urban myth.
Giant Camel Spiders In Iraq - Hoax
There is such a creature, but camel spiders are not really spiders though they look like spiders. They are not huge monsters that even possess venom let alone use it, and do not eat camels and people.
There are so many incredibly tall tales in memes about these creatures that it's just best to read the article on them in the link above. Suffice it to say, the scary myths about them perpetuated in memes just aren't true.
Mexican Largest Flower in the World Photo - Blooms Once Every Forty Years Hoax
The flower itself is real, it does exist. But it doesn't grow wild in Mexico or bloom only once every 40 years. It grows wild in Sumatra Indonesia and the picture in the meme was actually of one of these flowers in a botanical garden in Stuttgart Germany.
Columbia Shuttle Photo Hoax, Pictures Actually From Armageddon Movie.
The pictures of the explosion are not those of the space shuttle Columbia and were not taken by an Israeli satelite. They are pictures of a scene in the 1998 movie Armageddon. This thoughtless hoax attempts to trivialize and dishonor the people who lost their lives when Columbia went down.
Can't Bear False Forwards
The big bear attack story is false and the pictures weren't even taken where the meme claims they were.
Large Reptile Hoaxes
A golfer did not lose his arm to an alligator. The pictures are of an entirely different location and situation and have nothing to do with the bogus golfer story.
Crocodiles don't live in New Orleans.
There never has been any escaped or abandoned pet alligators living under any city in sewer systems and coming up through toilets either. That is just an anti-exotic pet propaganda myth.
Don't Lose Your Head Over Crocodile Beheading Bungee Jumper Beer Commercial Video!
The video of the bungee jumper losing his head to a crocodile is not a real incident, but part of a beer commercial.
Whatever miracle heart-helper some dummy news item on TV said years ago, that beer supposedly contains is so little that you'd have to drink a pool of the stuff and of course by that time, your heart would probably no longer be beating anyway and the rest of your organs completely destroyed.
Burundanga Drug-laced Business Card Hoax
the scary-sounding warning about burundanga drug-laced business cards is false.
Eggs and flour are not effective as treatment for burns.
butter vs. margarine
The chain letter claims margarine is really toxic and bad for you, so bad that flies won't touch it. why? Because margarine is only one molecule away from being plastic of course.
Uh, table salt is also a molecule away from being either chlorine or straight sodium, both poisonous in their pure form and with enough exposure. Sheesh, chain letters like this still dupe so many people, playing on their lack of even the basics of chemistry and common sense.
Margarine is not toxic and bad for you, and since when should we judge the safety of something based on whether or not flies are into it? flies get into many horribly disgusting things that any normal human being wouldn't touch.
Don't Have A Canary Over The Canola. The Chain Letter Is False.
Oh, no! It's that "Canola Oil IS Deadly!" chain letter making the rounds again!
Don't spread that hoax!:
No, canola oil is not new, and not unsafe.
Also, the lady who supposedly wrote the letter called "Athalie" Isn't that supposed to be "Nathalie?"
Anyway...
According to TruthOrFiction, the canola chains come out of an ongoing dispute
The canola chain is false in all the important places, and might have a grain of truth in some of the less important ones, just enough to bulk up the falsehoods and get readers jumping to conclusions without thinking, and then to spreading the rumors.
Note to anyone eager to share neat Youtube videos on their latest new mobile or netbook/notebook, or in this case an Ipad - that meme video about cell phone popcorn or cell phone boiled eggs - is false!
No, people, you can NOT microwave popcorn and boil eggs using cell phones!
The popcorn one was actually an advertisement for Cardo bluetooth headsets, and companies definitely have enough mula to buy very sophisticated video editing equipment and use it in conjunction to make a totally edited out the wazoo video look like an actual experiment done by the average Joe down the street.
And that's probably why so many people got sucked into the cell phone popcorn video hoax. It looks like an impromptu video made by your average set of young people, but it is very carefully put together and edited with all the camera and editing tricks liberally applied.
Another faked up video has people believing that adding hydrogen peroxide to Mountain Dew will make it glow.
There is some hydrogen peroxide in glow liquid - along with a bunch of other stuff, and that liquid doesn't even glow on its own without the glass component being added and then broken to start the reaction.
Sorry, but something is more than a little off.. and rotten.
You can't recharge iPhones or anything else by microwaving them. Sheesh, people!
Clubbing Fire Ants With Soda Water
Club soda in the method described in that meme won't do away with fire ant colonies, and Walter Reeves never promoted this idea, disclaiming it on his site.
Cruise controll won't make your vehicle take flight on a wet road. Bad weather conditions can do that whether or not you use cruise control, but using cruise control could help a bad situation get worse.
Common sense should tell you not to use cruise control in bad conditions or forward wildly alarmist chain letter stories that didn't happen or can't be verified, and have undergone so many mutations, some being rather insulting and patronizing to certain people.
So, yes, remember not to use cruise control in the rain, but also remember not to share that meme.
No, memes Won't Stop The Flu Or Spoil The Onions!
Cut onions are not a bacteria magnet, and putting them on your feet will do nothing but waste a perfectly good food stuff. Those rumors are wild exaggerations. Onions do go off like any other food after some time.
Onions will not prevent the flu.
Dr. Goyal, whacko and uber annoying Dr. Oz, or Dr. Anybody didn't write these so-called prevention tips for H1N1 or any other flu strain. Most aren't even proven true, the first couple are just common sense that you don't need chain letters telling you.
No, you will not turn into a zombie by getting any strain of the flu.
So remember this. No one ever got saved or cured by chain letters.
HalaHysteria
There are memes going around telling people to boycott food with Muslim symbols on it because it's supposedly some kind of creeping sharia trying to take the world over.
Cadbury Dairy Milk Hala hysteria
Cadbury Products - Halal Certification Authority Logo Protest Email
Cadbury Dairy Milk with LHS Symbol
Depending on which mutation of the meme, pick a nation, any nation.
It is yet another raging anti-Muslim hysterics chain letter, screaming that Muslims are going to take away the Australian (or American/UK/Canadian etc.) way of life, all because of a symbol seen on Cadbury products.
Yes, the symbol is there, but what the meme claims is nothing but paranoid balderdash. The symbol in question serves basically the same function as a Kosher symbol or a peanut-free symbol, letting Jews or Muslims or people alergic to peanuts know a product is safe or okay to eat by their health and/or religious standards.
However, unless there are actually islam-forbidden edibles hidden among food stuffs, the symbol is unnecessary. You're not going to find pork in chocolate. I see no reason to include that symbol and would not be upset if it was removed from all foodstuffs.
Clearing Up Red Light Rumors
Read article here.
Eating turkey will make you sleepy because it contains tryptophan?
um, 4 ounces of turkey contains about 350 MG, nowhere near a level that would make you sleepy.
That's not all.
Guess what? Other foods contain tryptophan too. Beef, chicken, milk, and beans contain as much per serving as turkey. In addition, you would have to consume a prodigious amount of turkey, or milk, beans, chicken, beaf etc. in order to get upwards of 2000 MG of tryptophan, and by the time you hork down that much of any given substance, there would be a lot more wrong with you than drowsiness.
Fake Pothole Stickers
Fake Pothole Stickers on the road. They weren't meant to slow down speeders, but were an ad campaign. That's not only crazy, but potentially very dangerous.
Someone at their computer: "Did you know that raisins and grapes are poisonous to dogs!?"
Ocean Elf: *Struggling to stifle groan, gritting teeth, trying not to roll eyes and show a visual reaction* Heard about it......
Person: Oh, is it nonsense?"
Ocean Elf: Pretty much. *walks off, annoyed.
And to add to my annoyance is a debunk that basically says the story is true - but here's the catch. it is apparently true, but only because it happened to some dog eating a ridiculous quantity of raisins that did him in. The dog in this and other meme stories didn't eat just one or two or a few to several grapes/raisins, or even a few a day, but a whole freaking tin, like, a pound in one sitting. That would probably cause us to become ill too.
Besides, I don't own a dog and have no plans to in the future.
The meme has also mutated to the point where there are several variants that make it questionable. It's that old friend of a friend thing again.
So raisins are poisonous to dogs - if eaten in ridiculous quantities.. So what? Same with anything else.
So turkey has tryptophan. Who cares? No more or less than other foods and the amount of it won't knock you out.
Beer has a heart-healthy component? Big deal, not enough to do any good.
Salt contains chlorine. Oh, noes!
Ohmigosh! Dihydrogen monoxide is deadly!
Relax, it's perfectly safe. It's how some compounds become what they are, composed of molecules of different elements.
*drumroll crash!*
WATER!
So relax about the butter VS. margarine thing too. If margarine is one molecule away from being plastic, as the screeching hysterical chain letter says, salt is one molecule away from being straight chlorine. Break the chemical bond of the chlorine and the sodium, and you would have these two elements all on their own.
Yes, dihydrogen monoxide can be deadly, but we also can't live without it.
why?
Because this mysterious compound is none other than:
dihydrogen (H2) monoxide (O) =
H2O!
WATER!
So, don't re-share these dummy news memes to alarm people needlessly or just waste their time, and remember, your pet isn't going to die if he happens to eat one or two grapes. Neither will you collapse into a drugged stupor from a turkey dinner.
BP: Aaaarrgh! *grimace* Oh, sheesh! I know for a fact that raisins/grapes aren't poisonous for dogs! My dog's eaten plenty of grapes and raisins in his time, and it hasn't done him any harm. But if it has something to do with a pwecious pet, people just have to pass it on, 'cause they're so worried they'll poison they're wittle pwecious doggy-woggy. *rolls eyes* Sheesh!
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