6 Facebook hoaxes you’ve probably seen so far in 2018
We’re not even half way through 2018, yet there has already been a number of hoaxes spreading virally across social media, namely Facebook, so far this year. Here are the top 6 based on our website and social media activity.
Mark Zuckerberg has said it’ll cost money to use Facebook.
When? April
Unbelievably, this decades old hoax still has the ability to pounce at any time. While we may not see it as often, the claim that Facebook is introducing a charge still somehow, inexplicably, manages to trick people into sharing it across the social networking platform.
These hoaxes trace back to the early days of the Internet, long before Facebook, and targeted older services such as MSN Messenger and AOL Chat. Since then they morphed onto newer services such as Facebook and have never gone away.
No, Facebook are not charging. It says so right on their homepage. We discuss this type of hoax in our article here.
Cadbury’s/Anchor Butter products infected with HIV?
When? March
Scarelore about tainted foodstuff is definitely nothing new, and neither is the claim that a particular product has been intentionally infected with the HIV virus, typically from a “disgruntled factory worker”. Pepsi were one of the original targets to this brand of misinformation, but hoaxers have moved on, and Cadbury’s found themselves in the firing line in 2018.
To confirm, the warnings had no validity. They were merely copied from earlier hoaxes, almost verbatim, with the company named swapped over. Cadbury’s is not the only company in 2018 to face this hoax either. Anchor Butter also faced a bombardment of warnings circulating social media claiming a disgruntled worker had infected their products with HIV. The warning was, unsurprisingly, identical to both the Cadbury’s and earlier Pepsi versions. And just like those warnings, it also contained absolutely no truth to it whatsoever.
See our article on the hoax here.
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Poison injected into bottled water?
When? April
Warnings went viral purporting that “government officials” had been asking everyone who had purchased water to check the lids to see if they had been tampered with because, according to the warnings, someone had been injecting poison into the bottles, resulting in several deaths.
Like many fake warnings, this lacked any credible details. What brand of water? What type of poison? Where was it happening? Which branch of government released the warning?
It was untrue, and was likely inspired by a video that appeared to show bottled water with holes in the lids. Police investigated that incident, but determined that there was no apparent malicious intent, no poison, and definitely no deaths. We discussed the warnings here.
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