How To Create Your Own Hoax
Some people still confused to differ between spam and hoax. Spam is a message that contains certain product/website’s promotion which actually we never expect to receive it, for more info see Spam on Wiki page. While hoax is a fake news.
Hoax spreads via anywhere; e-mail, bulletin board, social bookmarks, chats/messenger, SMS, etc. To know how exactly hoax is different with spam, now let’s learn a little bit of how to make hoax. This is for example and education only.
Steps to Create Hoax:
1. Choose a Unique Topic
The topic can be vary, computers associated is not required. It can be about healthy, finance, humanity, or even about weather. Let’s try a simple things. For example, let’s choose about “mouse” that we use on our PC.
2. Find a “Problem”
We had chosen topic about “mouse”. Now we have to find a problem which is at least can makes people wonder and trying to tell their friends later. For example:
“The usage of optical mouse can cause cancer”
How’s that? Not bad. Ok, now let’s move to the next step:
3. Create the “fake fact”
Try to use famous scientific terms, and don’t forget to give some additional datas in numbers. Let’s say:
“The comfortable of optical mouse in fact has a dangerous side-effect. Three years since it’s launched by Microsoft, many abnormality cases has been found on users hands due to the radiation that emerged by optical mouses. The optical mouses transmitting high-frequency electromagnetic’s wave to it’s surfaces underneath. The frequency level is higher than on cellular phones.
The effect of mouse radiation will be more on low-quality products, because good products have a better shield to protect our hands.
It has been widely known that our hands or feet’s palm is the center of body’s nerves. The mouse radiation that is felt by our hand’s palm can cause a fatal effect for health; according to WHO reports, the optical mouse radiation is 5 times bigger than cell phones radiation’s. But the mouse radiation will be more dangerous because it continuously held by users while works with their PC.”
4. Don’t forget to add some well-known company’s name.
“WHO, GreenPeace, and CNN has stop the usage of optical mouses for their entire offices, while Microsoft and IBM pour fund about blablabla $ to cooperate for make another saver pointing device.
The biggest hardware industries in China and Taiwan trying to cloak this news. In fact, the circulating optical mouses in market today is produced by low-quality brands, because it is the remaining products from the big industries that have been stopped their sales.”
5. Give another “sucks” solution
“Therefore, when you work with your PC, try to hold mouse only if needed. Practice to use Hotkeys (Ctrl-c, Ctrl-v for copy paste, etc). Back to use an old ball-mouse model”
Lol.
6. Add some ‘miracle’ words
“Just in case, one of my friend had been suffered on her hand about 2 months ago. Please forward this message to the peoples who you love.”
7. Give ‘forward effect’
A hoax email should be likely been gotten from an exclusive source, or from related mailing list, therefore give “forward effects” to email subject:
“Fwd:[dailyhealth-mail-list]Optical Mouse can cause cancer (URGENT!)”.
Easy enough?
From the explanation above, we can see how easy people can create their own hoax. Therefore, after knowing how to create hoax explained before, we can see the difference between the true news with the fake one. The more people know the characteristic of hoax, the more less junk-mail will be spread on internet.
How to check a news whether its hoax or not?
- Just use your logical. For example hoax on social bookmarks about massive account deletion; “forward this news as a sign that your account is still active, otherwise friendster will delete many accounts due to the excessive amount of data on their server”. How the heck the site like friendster or facebook will delete their user accounts only because they could not provide a bigger capacity for users profile database? It’s clearly hoax.
- If available, try to follow the links or any clue to find the source line of the news, is there any source that can be trusted? This will be difficult to do but it’s worth it.
- Ask your friend who have more competency about that topic of news.
- Search on Google about the validity of the news.
- Visit some hoax-watcher site (a site that specially created to investigate hoaxes and listing all hoax that have been found).
In my opinion, hoax is more evil than spam. People spamming to make money, for their daily-life needs and for their family, even if the way is disturbing other people’s privacy. But people create hoax is only about self-satisfaction: succeeded to tricks the public. Creating hoax won’t make someone getting any money, except a pseudo-joy he got when his/her “work” spreads on Internets and reads by billion users on internet. While thousands of people who works on related industries experiencing profit-losses because suddenly peoples won’t buy their products, thousands of people experiencing fraud/worry/restlessness due to read the hoax.
Popularity: 48% [?]
Popularity: 48% [?]
I just found out lately that ‘Sarah Palin did not know Africa as a continent” is just a hoax.
And to bad there is a television and as I know our own newspaper that quote those hoax which taken from blog…
That’s why i better read blog than watching our TV lol.