No one is going to close the Internet down for a day of spring cleaning. And the Miller Brewing Company is not celebrating the millennium by giving away free six-packs of beer to two million computer users. Peter DaSilva for The New York Times Charles Hymes runs a nonprofit Web site that exposes online hoaxes. He actually got well, thank you very much. Well enough to wish that he and a variety of charities were not still getting cards.
Hoaxes can spread through the Internet faster than viruses, to which they have been compared.
And with just a few clicks in your address book, it is easy to forward a chain letter, a virus warning or a list of specious True Facts. It is harder to figure out which messages are true, especially when many people check their powers of critical thinking at their Internet portals. It would seem to be easy enough to avoid what has been termed the gullibility virus, by just deleting any e-mail that smells like a hoax. But few people, especially those who are new to the Internet, can resist the urge to forward a message about the need, say, to send around a picture of an angel made out of repeated keyboard symbols to insure good luck. While forwarding such e-mail might seem harmless, consider what would happen if everybody did it.