Responsible Online Communications

Although most articles shared on this Blog site are written with military spouses in mind, this message applies to everyone who communicates online……….which probably leaves out about 1% of the world’s population.

I wish I had just $1 for every Email message that has been forwarded to me with a request for me to pass it along to everyone in my address book. And if I had an extra $1 for each of those messages that contained false information, we could retire early!

Let’s not even count those with political propaganda. Let’s just talk about those that tell you that Microsoft or Dell is going to hand out lots of money to everyone on the list, that a particular brand of soft drink will eat rust and therefore will also eat your internal organs, or those want you to add your name to a partition that’s going to the White House to stop a bill that will drastically change our Social Security benefits.

We like to think we’re helping others by passing along information that might make them wealthier, healthier or wiser! But if we pass those messages along without taking responsibility for the content, it’s more likely that we will pass along a virus, allow phishing scams to collect the names of our friends and family or maybe even cause sales of particular products to drop substantially due to unverified information.

I don’t think anyone intentionally passes along misinformation…………..well not unless “the beverage that eats rust” story was originated by its primary competitor!  The problem is that most of us have so much on our plate at all times that its easier to just pass it along and let everyone else worry about whether or not its true, than to take time to verify it. Of course, the other reason (and most probable) is that most people don’t know where to go to verify those tales and they don’t want to spend hours researching various topics through online searches. Many people are still not aware of Snopes.com.

This is in no way an advertisement for them, but most of the people I share this website with are grateful as they had no idea there’s a company online who already checks out all these tales. They have already done all the homework for us. All you have to do is 1) save them as a bookmark so you always know how to find them and 2) put your topic in the search field and hit “Search”.

If you only type in “Social Security benefits”, the search engines on Snopes.com are likely to turn up several results, but they’re pretty good about knowing which story is circulating the Internet right now, and you’ll typically find those on top.  They not only tell you those that are false, but those that are true…………..or partially true, and they tell you when their results where updated last just in case a story that was once false has (hypothetically) just become true!

The reason I know about Snopes.com is because I too was once guilty of passing along information that was false and one of my recipients shared this excellent online resource with me. I’ve been using them religiously ever since and thought it was worth sharing with you!

Occasionally you may offend someone who sent you the message if your reply explains why you won’t be passing it along and how they too can verify the information. However, if your response is diplomatic and not judgmental, they too will typically be happy to discover someone who will do their homework for them!

If any of our readers have a valuable resource they’d like to tell us about, we welcome your feedback!

MZspouse