This week the Twitter-sphere was ablaze with information of “Premium” accounts that you would pay monthly for. These accounts were labeled the “Sparrow, Dove, Owl and Eagle”. These would cost $5, $15, $50 and $250 a month respectively. Now this was clearly a joke with the Eagle offering: “Users get 500 character limit, 1000 extra random followers, 3 celebrity followers of their choice, 5 hours on recommended list each month, Twitter Concierge for Tweeting while user is asleep or busy (and more), auto-spell check, “Fail Whale” tuxedo, custom “Fail Whale” page when service is down.”
Now I knew this was a rubbish story as it was found on BBSpot, a tech satire website but what really fascinates me is how this sort of thing spreads like wildfire. Within moments people were re-tweeting the story as if it was the most amazing item of news in the world ever.
Now what boggles my mind is how people fall for such obviously unrealistic information. What happens makes sense though: Twitter people read the little piece of information attached to the link and then don’t actually read what the link contains. For many it’s the fact that they would be able to break the news before anyone else, hardly a good reason but a reason to avoid fact checking.
This brings me to an interesting thought: we’re so connected via Twitter, Facebook and every other social network available but they’re actually so dull and pointless that all we use them for is to desperately get some form of information that we can find scandal somewhere.
So here’s the moral of the story: question what you read and don’t make a big deal about it if you don’t know the source. Quite simply you will look like an idiot.
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