Where ‘Debunking’ Does Not Mean Getting Out of Bed

(June, 2009)

By Wayne Maruna

I suppose we all want to be a hero in our own small way.  If we can’t save the world, at least we can prevent grief from visiting a friend’s door.  So we forward that email another well-intentioned friend sent, warning us that if we receive an email entitled “Elvis’s Favorite Donut Recipe”, we must NOT open it, lest a pernicious file embedded in the email would destroy our hard drive and leave a trail of oily, sugary residue on the inside of our computer.  And of course it’s got to be true, because it says right there in the email that it was checked out on Snopes.com and was found true.

NOT! 

As I wrote in an article published in the Nov. 2005 issue of the Taberna Tribune when I was doing a rant on email annoyances, this sort of thing is called an ‘Urban Legend”.  One website defines an ‘Urban Legend’ as “a short tale that is told and retold as true, although it usually has little or no basis in reality or can't be confirmed one way or another.”  What causes someone to release one of these fallacious prank email assertions into the wild?  I have no idea.  This is the computer article.  Go find the psychology article.

Anytime I receive a warning similar to the above, I set down my donut and head to www.snopes.com, the pre-eminent site on the web for debunking such viral tales.  And if the kindly-intentioned soul who sent me the warning had taken the time to do the same, they would have found, in 95%* of the cases, that either Snopes does not support the claim, or may in fact have declared the claim patently false.  (*In the spirit of this article, I must confess that 95% is a totally made up number with no scientific support to lend credence, and was used solely to imply an authoritative statement of fact.)

The names Barbara and David Mikkelson probably don’t mean anything to you unless you read the recent article in Readers Digest about them.  This middle-aged husband and wife team constitute all of the staff that brings you Snopes.com – that is, if you don’t count the five cats.  Working out of a double-wide trailer somewhere outside of Los Angeles, the two spend their hours researching many of the thousands of items forwarded to them by loyal Snopes readers whose combined visits to their website number over six million per month.  In the RD article, David revealed that they make a “very healthy” living selling advertising space on their website, so this is not merely a hobby for them.  Wouldn’t you just know that they met on the internet and got together despite Barbara living in Ottawa and David in La-La Land.  Their first date was spent poring through old magazines at the UCLA library.  Sounds like my kind of people.  And more or less, they have continued that first date through all the succeeding years.  (To read the entire Readers Digest Article, point your browser to http://tinyurl.com/cryrbk).

Oh, and for the etymologists among you, the name Snopes hearkens back to the name of a treacherous and cunning family that makes regular appearances in several William Faulkner novels. In fact, a trilogy of Faulkner books was devoted to a particular branch of this Southern clan who sought to rise from rural laboring roots to a middle class life through whatever means necessary. 

And so it was that I came to open an email delivered through TabMail recently, one which warned readers not to open an email allegedly from UPS or FedEx, because it contained a false document alleging to be an undelivered waybill which, if opened, would loose a virus on the unsuspecting recipient.  The email even said it had been checked out on Snopes and found to be true.  Aha, I thought!  Another of those phoney-baloney messages, I thought.  The silent alarm went off in my head, as I keyed in the Snopes URL and pressed Enter, whereupon I did a search on ‘UPS Email’.  Bingo, there is was, just as described.  But, wait; what’s this?  True?!  The claim was TRUE?!  For Pete’s sake, you can’t count on anything in this world anymore.  Now anytime I get one of those warning shots across the bow, I’m going to have to go check every last one of them.  I can’t just discard them out of hand anymore.  But in the meantime, I am going to continue to not worry about freezing water in plastic bottles for fear of releasing dioxins.  That one turns up as false.