This Is Why You Shouldn’t Believe Everything You Read On The Internet

The nice thing about social media sites like Twitter is that you can get up-to-the-second information at a constant rate. The bad thing is that so many people want to be the ones breaking the news that they will run with a story without actually verifying it. The very funny and ridiculously clever Jonny Sun decided to play a little social experiment to see how fast a fake story could travel and how people would react to it.

Sun posted this tweet:

If you’re wondering how you never realized Will and Jada named their kids using each of their first and middle names, it’s because it’s not true. Sun made a fake Google result to see how people would respond.

Not even two hours later, parody sites and joke accounts had already ripped off his “discovery” and started posting it as their own:

That’s to be expected, but what was even more fascinating is how many people claimed to have already known this fictitious fact and couldn’t believe it took everyone else so long to realize it.

A few viewers summed up the entire attitude of the Internet nowadays:

By the end of the night, it had even made its way over to Facebook, so get ready for all of your aunts to share the news over the next few months.

And in just a few short hours, thousands of people were convinced that Will and Jada Pinkett Smith had completely different names. Remember, just because something is written on a picture and shared on your timeline doesn’t mean it’s true. Question everything and fact-check anything you read. But most importantly, don’t pretend you already knew something just to look cool. Odds are you’re going to look very, very dumb.