A wise man had once said, ‘Don’t believe everything you read on the internet’; and the irony of this is when you type out the quote on Google, most searches will indicate that the quote was by Abraham Lincoln, who was assassinated a century before the internet was born.
Some odd searches will even say that the quote is by Winston Churchill or Albert Einstein.
But that is the enigma of the internet – how it manipulates the gravitas of the published word. It counts on a much-older proverb that goes: ‘seeing is believing’.
The internet lays a web of words, much like a spider, to trap innocent flies hovering over his wall.
A most recent example of such a trap is a website called foolishhumor.com, which has left people on the internet second guessing.
Even though the website is a spoof, and proudly so, as it provides a caveat which reads: “This website is a humorous page whose sole purpose is entertainment. The content of Foolish Humor is fiction and does not correspond to reality”; yet a story on its page has got netizens into a tizzy.
The story, under the ‘Breaking News’ (easily the most over-exploited words in the media industry) section, is headlined, “Budweiser employee acknowledges having been pissing into beer tanks for 12 years.”
The story quotes a “Budweiser employee” Walter Powell (name-changed, obviously) who claims to have been urinating in beer tanks just before they are bottled for almost 12 years.
However, Walter being humanly able to be present in one city at a time, which is Fort Collins in Colorado, the Budweiser beer of other cities is “piss-free”, he claims.
When asked the most pertinent question, WHY?, Walter said the toilets in the factory were too far and he was too lazy to walk.
What remains inconspicuous is how Walter managed to take a leak into a beer tank without getting detected by any one of the 750 people working in that office.
As soon as the story was up on the web, it spread its tentacles on social media, where people love to hover but don’t bother to read.
Add to this, the devilish ‘crop tool’; screen grabs of the story – minus the fact that it was a published on a parody website – made their way to every household in India using WhatsApp as a conduit.
Not only is #Budweiser the top trend on Twitter in India, serious news websites have also carried the story saying, 'You will stop drinking Budweiser beer after reading this'.
It won’t be long before several families are seen throwing Budweiser beer bottles from their balconies.
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