Fear, Uncertainty, Doubt.

Years ago, a student managed to put together a significant number of petitions to have a certain chemical banned. And when you hear about what this chemical can do and where it is found, you yourself might want to jump on the band wagon. To give a few examples...

• contributes to the "greenhouse effect". 
• may cause severe tissue damage. 
• is fatal if inhaled. 
• contributes to the erosion of our natural landscape. 
• accelerates corrosion and rusting of many metals. 
• may cause electrical failures and decreased effectiveness of automobile brakes. 
• has been found in excised tumors of terminal cancer patients. 

Despite the danger, it is often used:

• as an industrial solvent and coolant. 
• in nuclear power plants. 
• in the production of Styrofoam. 
• as a fire retardant. 
• in many forms of cruel animal research. 
• in the distribution of pesticides. Even after washing, produce remains contaminated by this chemical. 
• as an additive in certain "junk-foods" and other food products. 

Yeah, pretty nasty stuff don't you think? What Nathan Zohner did back in 1997 was to stir up a massive hysteria about DiHydrogen Monoxide. Also known by its more common name of "Water". And he did it to generate research for his paper "How Gullible Are We?"

Or how about this one? Bonzai Kittens where a website was advertising ways to get kittens to grow in jars and allow themselves to be molded to fit the shape of the jar, supposedly for a life on containment in said jar.

People were do freaked out over this that even the FBI was brought in to investigate this website.

Except that the site did not actually have the materials for sale and seemed to be nothing but pictured of kittens stuffed into jars that were large enough to accommodate them. After all, anyone who has ever owned a kitten knows just how flexible the little jokers are and how their curiosity draws them into open containers like moths to the porch light.

Don't believe me? Check out "I Can Has Cheezburger" or this youtube video of a kitten getting into and out of a hamster ball all by itself. No one forced it in, it is under no stress, and once it got out, it was trying to get back in.

Guess what? It was found to be simply a case of a humor website being created (in poor taste perhaps) that got a lot of attention of people who were very much animal lovers. It was another "something" taken out of context that had people worked up.

And in both of these cases? This was before Facebook. Before Twitter. Before the internet meme and the concept of "going viral". This was just done by good old fashioned e-mail and word of mouth.

So...why am I bringing these relics of a bygone age up? Because the same thing is happening to day. The difference is that we have Social Media and Meme's and "things going Viral". People can freak out in record breaking speeds.

I already did the bit on the "Let's drug test people who are on welfare." in my last post. It hit, I saw it spread among my friends in less than 24 hours, and 24 hours after that, when I and others like me did some research and posted the $3-4.4k to one spending to savings ratio, it died down.

Flash in the pan. Here and gone.

So again, why am I bringing this up? Because now we have things flash past regarding Obama, Romney, Genetic Modified Foods, Aluminum, Silver, Zombies (thanks to the Drug Induced attacks of recent news events), 2012 being the end of the world...and far too many to recount here.

I had honestly wanted to try and create something and post it to Facebook just so I could see what would happen. But then I decided against it since it would harm whatever I was going to blast.

So I'm simply posting here. Don't take everything you read coming across Facebook as gospel truth. Anyone with a basic photo-editing software package can take an image and put text on it that can say anything. Look at the aforementioned "I Can Has Cheezburger" site for a good example of this. But anyone can do this and say that "[X] causes [Y] and should be banned!" Anyone like [X]'s competitor, someone who holds a grudge against [X], or someone who was bored and wanted to see what people would do if they said [X] was evil.

So please...take a few minutes and do some research on your own. It's not hard. Google, Wikipedia, Bing...any decent search engine in fact. So do some research and if you think there is sufficient evidence to back up the cutsy picture, then repost it...but maybe add a link to an article or two to show that you're not just spreading FUD (Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt) but are in fact pointing out a legitimate concern.