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Believe it or not!

My mom called me several days ago and shared this headline:

“17 Texas Kindergarteners Contract Ebola After Exposure To Liberian Foreign Exchange Student”

After lecturing me about keeping safe for what seemed to be an eternity, she told me to read the article and said that she was going to call my sister to also inform her of this epidemic.

The ebola scare is alive and well. The fact that ebola had indeed touchdown in America and had infected an American nurse AND the fact that it has a reputation of being up to 90% lethal, it is quite understandable as to why there is so much hysteria surrounding this disease.

Although ebola is deadly and lethal, it seems that this story, put out by a site called National Report, is nothing but a hoax. A hoax that was shared by several hundred thousand people on Facebook alone. Feeding on people’s fears and their lack of context on social media, satirical sites like the National Report are able to bring millions of visitors to their site.

A site called Emergent.Info “tracks the spread of rumors online in real time.” Craig Silverman, founder of Emergent.Info, said, “When there’s a lot of fear and anxiety and lack of information, or at least lack of understanding, humans try to talk through it, they throw stuff out there, and that births rumors.” In this case, people have used social media as a medium to shed light on subjects like ebola or ISIS; unfortunately, not all information shared on social media is true.

When many people begin sharing the same link on Facebook or Twitter, it is typically assumed that the information shared is valid. This is a nice demonstration of information cascade.

http://www.theverge.com/2014/10/22/7028983/fake-news-sites-are-using-facebook-to-spread-ebola-panic

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