Forwarding Hysteria
Original:
http://kith.org/logos/things/noforward.html
(Last change: 4 June 1997.)
How many times have you received email that says "please forward this to
everyone you know"? How many times have you forwarded such email and later
discovered that you'd helped perpetrate a hoax, or learned that the email
became outdated two years before?
Any time that you receive much-forwarded email telling you to do something
that seems a little odd, or warning you of a problem, try to verify the
information given before following the instructions or forwarding
the email. It can save a lot of trouble (and sometimes money!) later.
The Net allows hoaxes and urban
legends to reach hundreds of thousands of people within hours; it's
often (as demonstrated by the durability of the Craig
Shergold business) difficult or impossible for the truth to catch up
with the rumor. It's especially tough to contain such items because well-meaning
people like to tell everyone they know about potential dangers and about ways to do
good. But it's really best to resist the temptation to tell anyone these
things until you've checked up on the info yourself.
Here are some of the general types of false or distorted information that
most commonly get distributed without verification:
- Mail that exists only to be forwarded (chain
letters (also known as chain mail); the email AIDS
letter)
- Requests for anything (cards, aluminum pulltabs, email) to be sent to a
sick person, a hospital, or anyone else (Craig Shergold, for instance; or
the students supposedly doing a science project about
email; or the leukemia letter, which crosses
with the previous category; or the Houghton-Mifflin spam
request (similar to next category))
- Telephone numbers and email addresses supposedly paid for by a
specifically-mentioned person or group (800 number "paid for by Jesse
Helms"; email address that "gets Sun to donate money to charity")
- Warnings of computer viruses ("Good Times")
- Warnings of dangerous activity in the real world ("lights out!")
- Requests for email or calls to fight a specific policy (FCC Modem Tax (I've now got info on the new wave of
FCC-related panic mail, too))
and so on. A good rule of thumb is that if you don't personally know the
original originator of the message, it may well have been distorted
in transmissionremember the game "Telephone"? Information tends to get garbled as it's
passed along, even if it was true originally. (It also tends to get outdated
as time goes on...)
Here's another good rule of thumb: if you receive a piece of email which
demands that you panic without thinking, it's probably not a good idea to
follow instructions. This is particularly applicable to the last three
types of commonly forwarded mail on the above list.
Before you forward anything to a large number of people, stop and think. Do
you know for sure the email is true? Does everyone you're writing to need to know
about it? If the answer to either question is "no," you might reconsider
sending it out.
This page is not meant as an attack on anyone. Forwarding important email
is something most of us do at one time or another. I'd just like to see
people make sure of an item's accuracy before passing it on.
Addenda
- If for some reason you find yourself sending a note to the Net at large
and asking people to forward it, be sure and put an expiration date on it in
a prominent place. Otherwise, like the Craig Shergold meme, the note will
doubtless circulate on the Net forever. (It may do so even if you do
include an expiration date, but at least there's a chance that sense will
prevail.)
- Note that this page doesn't address the issue of email forwarding in
general (the "two-fifty" cookie recipe, lists of funny signs from non-US
hotels, puzzles about finding out which gold coin is lighter than the
others, etc.). Some such items (such as Dave Barry columns) are
copyrighted (new link), and
therefore
illegal to forward (please follow that link if you think it's okay to
forward copyrighted material as long as you don't charge for it); but most forwarded
net-folklore items are relatively harmless. It's worth noting, however, that (a)
many such items are urban legends with no basis in fact whatsoever; and (b) most such
items have been around since long before there was an Internet, and many people
have seen them many many times before. If you're new to the Net, check with someone
who's been around a while longer before you forward something, to find out whether
the item in question is an old chestnut.
- Several items have been making the rounds lately that don't fit
comfortably into the above categories. I view this development as the "forward this
note!" meme adapting itself to a harsher climate. The items in question
include several electronic petitions (one asking the French government to
stop atomic testing, another asking the US government to keep funding public
broadcasting, another asking a corporation not to give in to public pressure). I
don't see much harm in these petitions, but I'm afraid I don't see much good in them
either. There's an enormous amount of overlap, for one thingI've
receieved at least three copies of each of them, and presumably the lists returned to
the originators overlap significantly. (If I'm person 499 on the list and I send it
to ten friends, and they each sign it and send it to the originator, the originator
now has ten copies of each of the first 499 names.) Furthermore, the lack of a firm
closing date means the petitions could circulate indefinitely. (I expect to
see one protesting the FCC modem tax any day now.) And finally, any mail
which contains a lot of names and headers uses up bandwidth and disk space
that could be put to better uses. So I can't condemn these petitions, but I
question whether they're actually even remotely effective. If you want to do
good, it's far more effective to directly write to the politicians or companies in
questionespecially if you hand-write your own letter on actual paper.
Jed Hartman <[email protected]>