Parents and the Internet

"f86sabre" (f86sabre) 07/28/2020 at 08:15 • Filed to: parents, internet

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My mom has bought into the “no one will cut and paste” this political/religious post version of the internet. These things usually involve some heart wrenching story. It is all false. There is zero fact checking. It is frustrating as she was one of the ones who taught me to question and check facts.

E90M3 > f86sabre 07/28/2020 at 08:26

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I told my parents that I’m not interested in talking politics at home whatsoever. 

CarsofFortLangley - Oppo Forever > f86sabre 07/28/2020 at 08:41

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Sovande > f86sabre 07/28/2020 at 08:41

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What is it that you are talking about?  I don’t understand the first line of your post?

shop-teacher > f86sabre 07/28/2020 at 08:59

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Ugh. My dad was *this* close to falling for the “We detected a bu g on your computer , call us so we can fix it” scam. He actually called! He figured out it was BS before he actually gave them access, thankfully.

ranwhenparked > f86sabre 07/28/2020 at 08:59

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Ive got one elderly friend on there, volunteer from a place I used to work, who does that constantly. I keep him on because a) I don’t really get offended by much of anything, and just don’t really care, and b) we have mutual friends/acquaintances that he keeps in better touch with than me, so if something significant happens, he’s probably where I’ll find out about it. A large amount of what he posts is totally fake, and really obviously so (Microsoft does not, and never has, owned a genetic research lab in Wuhan - foreign firms are not allowed to own more than 50% of such an establishment in China, and they’re a friggin computer software company, they’re not even in that industry). I’ll see comment threads where some of his other friends and family will waste a lot of time trying to argue back and correct him, but he’s totally dismissive. If they post a link to Fox News, it’s “Fox is in bed with Never Trump Republicans, they’re biased”, if they link to CNN, its “ CNN is a leftist propaganda outlet in bed with Antifa and AOC”,if they link to a company's own website, annual report, or balance sheet, it's "they're hiding the truth, cover up" i f they don’t post any link and just give common facts, he demands they prove it with a link.

newnamesameme > f86sabre 07/28/2020 at 09:03

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Ppl 50 and older have had their brains broken by the internet. What our parents told us about video games (im 49 btw) causing violence and turning us anti-social didnt happen. Facebook has actually done that after all for our parents. 

Wacko > shop-teacher 07/28/2020 at 09:07

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or the classic we got video of you pleasing yourself in front of your computer.......

shop-teacher > Wacko 07/28/2020 at 09:12

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Ha! I forgot about that one.

gmporschenut also a fan of hondas > f86sabre 07/28/2020 at 09:17

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my florida couisn fell down the covid is a false flag for 5g microchips. so i just started reporting to FB all the vids. the last 5 posts are all removed.

I have an aunt that shares a couple of these things a day, and I just wish i could hear a  psychologist asessment of why. 

Ash78, voting early and often > Sovande 07/28/2020 at 09:20

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He’s saying that his parents don’t believe people will re-share fake articles, that everything posted is unique and accurate.

TheRealBicycleBuck > f86sabre 07/28/2020 at 09:57

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M y mom did that for a while. Then I responded to everything she sent me (pre-Facebook) with the debunking article from Snopes. After a while, she came to her senses.

I tried the same thing with my cousin, but he’s headstrong and ignores my responses. 

ranwhenparked > shop-teacher 07/28/2020 at 10:04

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When I was a bank manager, we had a group of “frequent flyer” elderly customers who were in every few weeks to every few months to correct some scam or another that they had fallen victim to. One actually shared all her account information - online login ID, password, etc, with somebody who told her she won a contest and they needed access to her online banking to wire her money.

The staff would just all collectively groan when one of them walked in the door, it was always something. No matter how much you tried to explain what sort of things were scams and how to identify them, it made no difference. One kept sending money to a woman in Moscow who promised to fly to Montreal and meet him there, eventually. He kept doing it, even after he recognized she was lying to him, because he figured she must really need money badly if she had to resort to that.

DAWRX - The Herb Strikes Back > shop-teacher 07/28/2020 at 10:06

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This guy did a really neat 4-part series on youtube about a similar scam operation. He even able to help get the guy at the top of the scheme arrested.

shop-teacher > ranwhenparked 07/28/2020 at 10:11

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Wow!

shop-teacher > DAWRX - The Herb Strikes Back 07/28/2020 at 10:11

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Awesome!

wafflesnfalafel > ranwhenparked 07/28/2020 at 10:26

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right.. I had an aunt like that.  Sent money to those contest scams multiple times...

ttyymmnn > ranwhenparked 07/28/2020 at 10:35

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Fox is in bed with Never Trump Republicans, they’re biased

Re ally? That’s news to me.

ttyymmnn > E90M3 07/28/2020 at 10:36

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I share my father’s generally liberal attitudes. But he spends much his days in retirement with the dial glued on MSNBC, and he likes to talk about what the talking heads there are saying. I try my best to ignore all of it.

ttyymmnn > TheRealBicycleBuck 07/28/2020 at 10:39

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I had a friend who fell down the far right hole 20 years ago (I think he was always a racist anyway). But whenever I tried to refute his ravings with Snopes, he just replied that Snopes was fake. There’s really nothing you can do to combat confirmation bias. I finally broke off contact, which was tough since we had been best friends since grade school. I just couldn’t take his bullshit any more. 

ranwhenparked > wafflesnfalafel 07/28/2020 at 10:45

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And it unfortunately falls pretty much entirely on the family to do something about it. Unless there’s a power of attorney or some sort of guardianship or conservatorship in place, the bank can’t legally stop the customer from accessing their own funds and doing as they please with them.

All we could do was try to explain to the customer as best we could that it was an obvious scam and try to convince them not to go through with the transaction, but, if they dug their heels in and insisted, we kind of had to just sigh and do it, and maybe put an alert into our fraud department as a heads up.

The only other course of action is to close a customer’s account and end all business relationships with them. That can be done if the customer’s behavior is exposing the bank to a potential loss, but you have to be careful that there’s no appearance of age discrimination. It has to clearly be based on  the customer’s activities and behavior, simply being elderly can't be a factor.

ranwhenparked > ttyymmnn 07/28/2020 at 10:48

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At this point, I think Infow ars and random stuff he comes across on Internet forums and his Spam folder are the only sources he trusts.

wafflesnfalafel > ranwhenparked 07/28/2020 at 11:08

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right - my aunt had been hiding it.  Her son only finally noticed something was up when she started to complain she didn’t have enough money to pay the power bill, groceries, etc.

f86sabre > Sovande 07/28/2020 at 11:18

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Basically, someone takes an event that usually involves religion or military, a sob story, and paint that the media, elites or others won’t share the story because they are against religion or the military. They leave out some core detail in these stories. Like that it happened 20 years ago or paint flat out falsehoods. The one I saw tomorrow said that when interviewing the widow of a fallen soldier who referred to Christ that NBC edited that part out. They didn’t. It was a live interview. But the post had a long screed about how the leftist media edited the widows comments due to baby Jesus. 

just-a-scratch > f86sabre 07/28/2020 at 11:25

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The tenses in your post “The one I saw tomorrow...” leave me skeptical a that you’ve checked the veracity of this event, yet it seems totally plausible.

[joke, a bad one, since I have to explain ]

Exage03040 @ opposite-lock.com > f86sabre 07/28/2020 at 11:55

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I’m still kind of amazed how Facebook went from posting up pics of the rager on Friday or Saturday night or festival in case you blacked-out (circa 2007-2010 for me) . To a meme and political shit posting site.

I think the exodus happened when everyone’s parent decided to join up (embarrassing) and s mart phone apps became a thing.

I would care if the internet went down. But I wouldn’t care if FB, Twitter, 4chan and bunch of the mainstream forum/content which have become personal propaganda   sharing got wiped.

I got into a little thought yesterday about millennial gen and how many of our parents sort of abandoned   religion. P erhaps many have turned to politics as affirmation and  using it as an ethical guide and ideology .

TheRealBicycleBuck > ttyymmnn 07/28/2020 at 12:05

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I tried Snopes. I tried links to studies and news sources. He responded to exactly one - with another meme. I guess I need to mute him for another month. He’s family, so I hate to sever the connection completely.

ttyymmnn > TheRealBicycleBuck 07/28/2020 at 12:29

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T hey said that having a world of information at our fingertips with the Internet would make us all smarter. Yeah, about that.

Akio Ohtori - RIP Oppo > f86sabre 07/28/2020 at 15:05

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Better yet part of that culture is thinking Snopes is in on whatever conspiracy of the week they’re worked up about and that is why Snopes say it is false... not because of like.. . facts.

Jokes on us I guess. Our parents didn’t monitor our internet usage when we were kids (though we turned out delightful... if a little kinky ) and now we’re not monitoring theirs and we get what we get...

Distraxi's idea of perfection is a Jagroen > ranwhenparked 07/28/2020 at 15:21

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“ he figured she must really need money badly if she had to resort to that”

When I was backpacking in India I got scammed ( for about $5)  by a street urchin, running a scam so old it was in Lonely Planet. I knew it was a scam about 5 seconds in, but went along because he was doing it so beautifully. Kid earned his money, and an Oscar.

ranwhenparked > Distraxi's idea of perfection is a Jagroen 07/28/2020 at 15:55

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Yeah, but you didn’t wire him tens of thousands of dollars over the course of a few years, in exchange for a promise to start a romantic relationship in Canada. 

Distraxi's idea of perfection is a Jagroen > ranwhenparked 07/28/2020 at 16:08

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Not yet. Ask me again when I’m 80.