Snopes plugin
Whenever a family member forwards an email with a warning about an urgent peril to my health, I immediately visit Snopes.com to confirm my suspicion that it’s a hoax. I then copy a link to the article and send it back, with a gently-worded request to please check Snopes before sending out similar emails.
Today’s threat (phenylpropanolamine) seemed designed to work around this firewall. It began thusly:
DRUG RECALL – VERY SERIOUS – CONFIRMED BY SNOPES.COM & FDA — tina
All drugs containing PHENYLPROPANOLAMINE are being recalled.
Why, if it’s confirmed by Snopes, then it can’t be a hoax! But the actual page on Snopes says otherwise.
Dear developers, please answer my simple plea: a Snopes plugin for email.
It can take myriad forms, from server-side filtering ( “We think this is a hoax”) to a simple button or link ( “Check Snopes”). But it would save so much time and grief.
Articles
February 10th, 2009 at 12:09 pm
But John, if emails were auto-checked for hoaxes, what would everyone’s mothers do with their now useless email accounts?
What? Like it’s only my mom that’s the culprit here.
February 10th, 2009 at 12:09 pm
My buddy calls it an “URL slap” when you reply with just an URL. Alas, I’ve URL slapped a few of my relatives over time.
February 10th, 2009 at 12:41 pm
I get about 3 of those emails every week from various relatives. They are so afraid if they don’t forward it to 15 people in the next 5 minutes that they will miss the opportunity for something “magical” to happen in their life. No need for fact checking when the “forward” button is just a mouse click away!
The worst part is how defensive people get when you “snope” them. It’s akin to the following:
INT. OFFICE WATER COOLER – DAY
CHARLIE and LOLA are sucking down some agua when Lola is suddenly enlightened.
LOLA
Hey, did you know Simon from accounting can fly?
CHARLIE
He what?!
LOLA
He can fly – F. L. freakin’ Y! George told Sue who told Jeff who mentioned it to Gladys who told me that George saw him fly!!
Charlie throws his empty cup in the garbage and leaves silently. Lola stares blankly.
INT. OFFICE WATER COOLER – 3 MINUTES LATER
CHARLIE
Simon can’t fly. I just asked him. But he did say he saw George in the bathroom with a bag of weed and a big smile on his face.
LOLA
Suck it, Poindexter.
Lola hurls her water in Charlie’s face and storms out, high heels pounding on the office carpet, the sound getting fainter by the second. Charlie is left alone with the water cooler. As he towels off, GEORGE stumbles his way through the entrance, grinning like the Cheshire Cat. Charlie mumbles to himself.
CHARLIE
I need a new career.
February 10th, 2009 at 4:20 pm
The inherent flaw: the people who need the plugin will not know to install it.
I have found (quite by accident) a much more effective tool: Reply-to-all with a message saying that this is a complete lie. It is apparently very embarrassing to the sender to be called out like that. I don’t get many forwards. I thought I had “enlightened” those people that send these forwards, but when I saw my wife’s e-mail full of forwards from the same people, I realized they just stopped sending them to me.
February 10th, 2009 at 4:37 pm
But a plugin for what? Outlook? Gmail? Whatever your grandmother uses?
That’s the tricky bit about fixing email. :)
February 10th, 2009 at 4:46 pm
What’s a plugin?
February 10th, 2009 at 4:51 pm
@Luddite:
A plugin adds functionality to an existing program. For example, Flash is a program that lets you play YouTube videos and other animations.
@kip:
Yes, but I can install it on my mom’s computer.
@Anonymous:
All or any of the above. You don’t want one solution; you want a web of solutions.
It would be pretty straightforward to write up a plug-in for Apple Mail (or draft on SpamSieve). Google could easily do it for Gmail.
AOL could do it — and let’s be honest, a lot of the people who fwd these emails are on AOL.
February 10th, 2009 at 11:54 pm
People who tend to forward these things usually aren’t that good at the Googling, hence their Happy Forward Finger. Ever since I started asking people to check online to see if something is true or not and pointing out that it often isn’t (and usually sending them to Snopes for additional reading on other hoaxes) people e-mail me FIRST and ask me if something is true or not before they forward.
Double-edged sword. But I guess it’s better than nothing.
February 11th, 2009 at 6:32 am
Hey john, I’ll see what I can come up with. What mail service do you use?
February 11th, 2009 at 9:23 am
“AOL could do it — and let’s be honest, a lot of the people who fwd these emails are on AOL.”
Oh goodness how that made me laugh!
February 11th, 2009 at 1:36 pm
@Christian H:
I’m using Mail (Mac). My mom is on Gmail. Greasemonkey is certainly acceptable for proof-of-concept. Or a JavaScript bookmarklet that checked the current text. Hell, even an Apple Service or AppleScript.
– John
February 11th, 2009 at 9:00 pm
A quick google news search would confirm the story is true (ish).
I say ISH because the headline is hyperbole, but the story itself is accurate.
February 12th, 2009 at 8:11 am
I just did that today (sent back a Snopes URL in response to an e-mail sent out by one of my family members — this one on how bad Coca Cola is for you). My mom has seen me do this often enough that now she sends me the e-mail to check out before she forwards it to anyone else. ..bruce..
February 12th, 2009 at 8:12 am
@LippyOne Right, but this happened over 9 years or so ago and is very outdated. That’s the point. Not only do email forwards get sent and are completely incorrect, but often times they’re old news. Way old news. Either way, it’s still clogging the works.
February 12th, 2009 at 6:29 pm
Snopes was what you would call a son of a bitches son of a bitch.
February 13th, 2009 at 10:32 am
We’re identical (well, except for the “extraordinary success” part you seem to have nailed down). My sister sends me something every week. But I never write back and ask my sis to stop. This is odd stuff she sends (the latest being that scientists at NASA discovered a missing day…AS WRITTEN IN THE BIBLE), but it’s HER odd stuff. It would hurt her feelings, I’m sure, if I asked her to stop. Plus, I’m her little brother and I love her dearly–this is her way of watching over me like she used to. And some things never change–I didn’t listen to her much back then, either :)
February 14th, 2009 at 2:59 am
The snopes plugin will be useless due to the fact that anyone that believes any of the stuff they forward will not know enough about snopes to respect its authority.
February 15th, 2009 at 10:46 am
But why would I trust Snopes to be the ultimate authority on “truth”?
That would be like replacing one church with another church. Or one wiki with another wiki.
I don’t know what the answer is to the proliferation of misinformation online, but there is no substitute for using your own brain.
Unless, of course, you heard it directly from John August…
February 21st, 2009 at 12:31 pm
One thing about texting that I love — there’s very little spam & no chain letters via text & most people can’t put everyone as a cc that’s visible. And most phones can’t forward text messages.
Oooh. Probably jinxed that by putting this thought into the blogosphere.