Tired of Inbox SPAM telling you the Swiffer kills your cat, or forwards from friends you thought you knew pledging belief in the Skunk Ape? Ohio trucker Suzanne Roquemore recently joined the Facebook group “>Check snopes.com before you send me this crap!”>, which brings together a community of SPAM and disinformation-weary humans. “I HATE getting that crap. Especially the election stuff,” she says. “LIES on both sides! But I get all the other ones. Swiffer will kill your cat and all that.”
Snopes.com, a reference page providing verifiable information on common urban legend-type myths, folklore and general misinformation propagated in the Internet rumor mill, is named after the Snopes family of William Faulkner’s work, a coterie of hardscrabble, not-always-likeable souls unafraid to point out the truth in the lie, or vice versa, of course. Today, the two “>Hottest Urban Legends” the site lists are its pages devoted to — you might have guessed it already — Barack Obama and Sarah Palin. Among the bogus myths: Photographs showing Sarah Palin posing in an American flag bikini with a rifle are not actually her. And, for the 1,000th time, Barack Obama is not a Muslim.
“>I don’t get much trucking SPAM,” says Roquemore. “Most of that is confined to the CB Radio. If the CB could send out SPAM, there would be some good ones out there!”
