Reports that NASA has confirmed the Earth will experience 15 straight days of darkness in November 2017 are just an updated version of an old hoax.
It’s time to set the record straight on a recent fake claim involving Venus and Jupiter that’s causing concern.
In recent days, rumors have been spinning around that Earth will experience 15 days of darkness this November. The reports, which cite a fake NASA document, incorrectly claim that from 2:50 a.m. Nov. 15 to Nov. 30, the Earth will go dark (and not just for a few minutes – but days).
The rumours are false. This is just the latest incarnation of a long running hoax that claims NASA have announced a period of sustained darkness during a period of time in the near future.
Back in July 2015, the fake news web site Newswatch33 published an article titled “NASA Confirms Earth Will Experience 15 Days of Complete Darkness in November 2015,” reporting that:
“NASA has confirmed that the Earth will experience 15 days of total darkness between November 15 and November 29, 2015. The event, according to NASA, hasn’t occurred in over 1 Million years.”
“Astronomers from NASA have indicated that the world will remain in complete darkness starting on Sunday, November 15, 2015 at 3 a.m. and will end on Monday, November 30, 2015 at 4:15 p.m. According to officials, the “November Black Out” event will be caused by another astronomical event between Venus and Jupiter.”
“Charles Bolden, who was appointed to head of NASA by President Obama, issued a 1000 page document explaining the event to the White House.”
This bit of fake news was lifted from an older (debunked) viral rumor that had already been around the online block several times before and has long since become an “evergreen” online hoax — a jape that is typically resurrected a few times a year by dubious web sites that simply update the time span for the alleged “period of darkness” and send it winging around the Internet again.
While Charles Bolden is a real NASA official, he issued no report or announcement about “15 days of darkness.” Moreover, Newswatch33 web site was not a legitimate news outlet, but a fake news site that began darkening the doorstep of social media networks shortly after the nearly identical NewsWatch28 fake news site shut down in mid-2015.
In the digital age, it is easier than ever to publish false information, which is quickly shared and taken to be true – as we often see in emergency situations, when news is breaking in real time.
“As reported in ‘The Guardian‘ one example among many, during the November 2015 Paris terror attacks, rumours quickly spread on social media that the Louvre and Pompidou Centre had been hit, and that François Hollande had suffered a stroke.”
“Sometimes rumours like these spread out of panic, sometimes out of malice, and sometimes deliberate manipulation, in which a corporation or regime pays people to convey their message.”
It’s called clickbaiting, and the web content is aimed at generating online advertising revenue, especially at the expense of quality or accuracy, relying on sensationalist headlines or eye-catching thumbnail pictures to attract click-throughs and to encourage forwarding of the material.
But sites like these, continue to write fake articles in the hopes of getting people to click through to their website.
The best way to stop the “fake news” is to not engage with it. The most important step in that process would be to verify the story in the first place.
So how do you know if a story is real or not? Well… here are some tips:
- Is that news anywhere else? Nope… then its not real.
- Can it be found on google? Nope… not real either!
- Does the name of the website have ‘gossip’ in the title? Most probably not real.
- Does the title make you really angry? Usually click-baiting!
Common elements of click-baiting:
- Establishing shot: An ordinary state creates normalcy.
- Unexpected events: Something incredible suddenly happens.
- Cliffhanger (Zeigarnik effect from psychology): Then this or that happened. But what happened is not mentioned in the title.
- Call-to-action: In most cases, elements are also used to entice the user to click such as ‘do not miss out’ or ‘must see’.
- Strong adjectives: unbelievable, startling, heartbreaking, etc.
- Superlatives: the best, the greatest, or the most unimaginable.
- Active verbs: learning, exploring, laughing, or crying.
- Internet slang: OMG, WOW, or LOL act as eye catchers in headlines and as identification with the internet community.
- Numbers: Numbers stand out from the text and generate attention. They are mostly used in lists.
If you want to go the extra step of helping social media in general, report the pages to Facebook admin. They don’t stand for fake news, click baiting or spam.
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