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AOL users and Urban Legends

Kochanski

Illuminator
Kochanski
Joined
Oct 8, 2005
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Today I received another Urban Legend email from one of my friends. This one was about hotel keycards as a way for people to steal your identity. It sounded fishy to me immediately, so off I went to Snopes and within 30 seconds I had confirmed that it was indeed an UL and quite, quite false. I replied to the email, told her it was false and gave her the link to the Snopes page with the info.

I have noticed that I get these forwarded by my friends who are AOL users. I can't recall an instance of one coming from anyone else. I have never used AOL as a service provider so I don't know if there is something in particular about their environment that somehow makes them more prone to passing of this nonsense without checking the veracity of it or if it just the type of person who chooses AOL that makes them more prone to it or if I am just seeing a pattern that is not there.

Anyone else have any experience of this?

I have always replied with Snopes links and even suggested that they check Snopes before forwarding to all and sundry, but it does not seem to work.

I would not mind so much, but they invariably also forward emails with every single email header from every previous person in the line with all email address intact and I know my email address is getting spread further and further to all sorts of places as a part of this nonsense.
 
Some but not all urban legend type e-mails I've received have indeed come from AOL users. Just a guess, with no proof, that a fair proportion of AOL users are either younger types and/or relatively new to the Internet. The very type that is prone to get suckered into passing along these stories to their new e-mail buddies. Anyone have hard data on this idea?
 
Kochanski said:
Today I received another Urban Legend email from one of my friends. This one was about hotel keycards as a way for people to steal your identity.
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Kochanski said:
I would not mind so much, but they invariably also forward emails with every single email header from every previous person in the line with all email address intact and I know my email address is getting spread further and further to all sorts of places as a part of this nonsense.
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Oh, the irony ...
 
Hamradioguy said:
Some but not all urban legend type e-mails I've received have indeed come from AOL users. Just a guess, with no proof, that a fair proportion of AOL users are either younger types and/or relatively new to the Internet. The very type that is prone to get suckered into passing along these stories to their new e-mail buddies. Anyone have hard data on this idea?
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No hard data, but as an AOL user myself, I can give you my firm opinion that your speculation is correct. There are several factors.

1) AOL saturates the market with those "FREE AOL" CDs (or at least they used to - AOL really is free now if you have other access), and is very commonly a new computer user's first exposure to the Internet.

2) Because of its proprietary and exclusionary environment (this is in the process of changing as well, but slowly), AOL users tend to stay AOL users, with little or no contact with the greater WWW.

3) Because of its excellent built in parental controls, it is the system of choice for many people with children.

4) Because of its simplicity of use, it is the system of choice for many computer neophytes.

My experience on AOL is that it is overrun with teens and bored housewives. Hence the abundance of those kinds of forwarded emails. Whenever I get one, I do the same as was described above. I look up the facts on Snopes.com, click 'reply all' and send the info and link, not only to the person who sent me the message, but also to every other person he or she sent it to.

I am unpopular in some corners of the AOL community.

:p
 
My cousin-in-law will forward ANYTHING, and I do mean anything. However, she is as far as I know not an AOL user and I have always put it down to her living in California. :D
 
My friends are not neophytes, they are not kids and they are reasonably savvy about many things on the internet. They all do things outside the AOL community and go to lots of other places on the internet. So I am somewhat at a loss when it comes to the guillibility of my friends on this.
 
Kochanski said:
My friends are not neophytes, they are not kids and they are reasonably savvy about many things on the internet. They all do things outside the AOL community and go to lots of other places on the internet. So I am somewhat at a loss when it comes to the guillibility of my friends on this.
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Bad news, chum. Your friends are morons. ;-)

Sorry, there I go making myself unpopular again. Actually, I suspect there's a lot of auto-pilot to the whole thing. They may simply forward these things on to everyone in their address book because "that's what you do." I have often got replies from people apologising for forwarding untrue urban legends, and promising to check Snopes first from now on, but sure enough, a few days later, there's their screen name in my inbox again, warning me about the latest virus that's going to burn a hole in my hard drive. If I complain enough, they stop sending them, but I suspect they simply take my name out of their address book, and keep on keepin' on without me. Which, truth be told, suits me just fine. I rarely sign on and have to sort through 50-60 garbage e-mails.
 
Kochanski said:
My friends are not neophytes, they are not kids and they are reasonably savvy about many things on the internet. They all do things outside the AOL community and go to lots of other places on the internet. So I am somewhat at a loss when it comes to the guillibility of my friends on this.
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Hear, hear.

I find that some otherwise totally reasonable people get suckered in to internet scams. Must be some kind of mesmerising effect like the slot-machine manufacturers use.

Can't say more now, I won not one, not two, but THREE 2 million Euro lotteries today and I have to e mail my claim! (If I can get ten of you to send in confirmation e mails, I'll get an extra TEN million Euros! So, anyone wanting a share, please PM me your e mail address so I can forward it to some people who will make your life hell with spam make you millions!
 
Gr8wight said:
My experience on AOL is that it is overrun with teens and bored housewives. Hence the abundance of those kinds of forwarded emails. Whenever I get one, I do the same as was described above. I look up the facts on Snopes.com, click 'reply all' and send the info and link, not only to the person who sent me the message, but also to every other person he or she sent it to.

I am unpopular in some corners of the AOL community.
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I tried that once. Unfortunately, I'd forgotten the little Outlook setting that automatically saves every e-mail address you reply to in your address book.

For over two years now, I've had about 40 email contacts in my address book that are someone else's friends/acquaintances, but just by name alone I can't really tell which is which, apart from maybe two dozen or so really obvious ones that I deleted right away.
 
My grandfather (AOL user) has a Ph.d in Physical Chemistry and forty years of experience working as a scientist. However, he still forwarded me an email last July explaining how that night, Mars was going to be closer than it had been in millenia.

I did the thirty seconds of research needed to prove the claim bogus (Mars was closest in summer 2003 than it will be for a while), and showed some simple physics to show why the email's arguments were ridiculous (it suggested that the closeness was due to the influence that Jupiter's orbit has on Mars- generally bogus stuff). He immediately understood, but I'm not sure he got the larger message, which is that you can't trust anything a forwarded email says.

It's not an issue of people being dumb or clueless about science- it's an example of people not understanding the internet. He assumed that the forwarded email was accurate in, well, the same way people assume that AOL is the best way to browse the internet.

So don't rag on the AOL users- think about how well you'll understand technology half a century from now.
 
Admiral said:
My grandfather (AOL user) has a Ph.d in Physical Chemistry and forty years of experience working as a scientist. However, he still forwarded me an email last July explaining how that night, Mars was going to be closer than it had been in millenia.

I did the thirty seconds of research needed to prove the claim bogus (Mars was closest in summer 2003 than it will be for a while), and showed some simple physics to show why the email's arguments were ridiculous (it suggested that the closeness was due to the influence that Jupiter's orbit has on Mars- generally bogus stuff). He immediately understood, but I'm not sure he got the larger message, which is that you can't trust anything a forwarded email says.

It's not an issue of people being dumb or clueless about science- it's an example of people not understanding the internet. He assumed that the forwarded email was accurate in, well, the same way people assume that AOL is the best way to browse the internet.

So don't rag on the AOL users- think about how well you'll understand technology half a century from now.
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No intent to insult Admiral's grandfather, but this brings up a broader question - how and why would an intelligent, educated person think something is true just because it was forwarded? If the same person had walked up to the grandfather and SAID, "Mars will be closer to the earth tonight than it has ever been," would the grandfather have believed him?

Is it because the Internet by its nature is largely written (although that's changing), rather than spoken? An extension of the "if it's in print, then it must be true" thing?
 
Kochanski said:
Today I received another Urban Legend email from one of my friends. This one was about hotel keycards as a way for people to steal your identity. It sounded fishy to me immediately, so off I went to Snopes and within 30 seconds I had confirmed that it was indeed an UL and quite, quite false. I replied to the email, told her it was false and gave her the link to the Snopes page with the info.

I have noticed that I get these forwarded by my friends who are AOL users. I can't recall an instance of one coming from anyone else. I have never used AOL as a service provider so I don't know if there is something in particular about their environment that somehow makes them more prone to passing of this nonsense without checking the veracity of it or if it just the type of person who chooses AOL that makes them more prone to it or if I am just seeing a pattern that is not there.

Anyone else have any experience of this?

I have always replied with Snopes links and even suggested that they check Snopes before forwarding to all and sundry, but it does not seem to work.

I would not mind so much, but they invariably also forward emails with every single email header from every previous person in the line with all email address intact and I know my email address is getting spread further and further to all sorts of places as a part of this nonsense.
Click to expand...
You just described my mother to a T, except that she doesn't use AOL.

I've been banging my head on the desk for years to try to get her to at least send her latest UL just to me, so I can fact-check it, before emailbombing her entire mailing list.

Last one she sent (and she sent it to all her friends, too), I recognized it as a hoax even before going to Snopes or About.com, and emailed her back: "Mom, did you even check to see if this was true before mailing it out?"

Answer: "I figured you would do it for me!"

:hb:

I love my mother, but sometimes I want to take her computer away from her.
 
My mother-in-law (a former AOL user) sends me every glurge and urban legend that crosses her inbox. Unfortunately, so does one of my sisters-in-law (not an AOL user). So I get double, double, DOUBLE the stupidity. Plus, my sis-in-law is very fond of sending me religious glurges. Like this one, for example.
 
Many people get really angry when you reply with a link showing their email is an UM. I stopped concluding with the line "don't believe everything you read on the internet" when I started including a link to Snopes (which somewhat made a mockery of my point), but even so, people don't want to be corrected, shown to be wrong, made to look foolish, patronised (as they see it) or in any way rebutted.

They want to be popular and accepted, and the forwarding of UMs, particularly those regarding scams, is part of a 'look at the favour I'm doing for you all, I could be saving your life/bank account here!' - it's done out of kindness so the debunking is basically a slap in the face of what's considered to be a favour. Also, there is a huge element of 'better safe than sorry' - the logic being that even if the email is an UM, there might be some truth in it and therefore worth forwarding.

But mainly it's that no-one likes a smartass. By debunking, you are saying you are smarter and more resourceful than they, and that they are gullible, lazy and stupid.

My experience is that the more you debunk, the less likely you are to receive the email, but that's only because the person stops including you in their mass spam.

But I still debunk the ones I get. A really good point to make in your replies is that UM emails are a form of virus, in that they are designed to clog up people's email system by mass forwarding, and every email sent and received has a cost for the user or company in internet resources, bandwidth etc.

The ones that really, really baffle me are the greedy idiots who forward those 'send this to 20 people and Microsoft will send you a bottle of champagne!' - it just doesn't enter their minds to question how the hell Microsoft or whoever would possibly know who you are from your email address, and how the hell they are magically tracking the email as it gets forwarded.
 
Wouldn’t it be nice if the side effect of all these e-mailed urban legends, Nigerian scams, and ID theft attempts (phishing) would be to create a new widespread attitude of critical thinking?

Imagine all the e-mail users thinking clearly … apologies to John Lennon. ;)
 
Shera said:
Wouldn’t it be nice if the side effect of all these e-mailed urban legends, Nigerian scams, and ID theft attempts (phishing) would be to create a new widespread attitude of critical thinking?
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Sure, that would be great. We can talk about it after I contact Mr. Nguyabi about the 21 trillion dollars he wants me to help him move out of his country before the government can seize it.
 
tkingdoll said:
Many people get really angry when you reply with a link showing their email is an UM. I stopped concluding with the line "don't believe everything you read on the internet" when I started including a link to Snopes (which somewhat made a mockery of my point), but even so, people don't want to be corrected, shown to be wrong, made to look foolish, patronised (as they see it) or in any way rebutted.
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I find this very true, too. The one exception was my uncle, who thanked me for showing him Snopes.
 
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