What do hoaxes do

Amish hoax. Economic Slow Down in US. Escrocs et portables. Family Pictures. Foot n Mouth. I'm your shadow. Loft Story.

Meninas da Playboy. Osama Vs Bush. Pikachus Ball. Pretty Flower. Patrick's Day. The New Ice Age. Virtual Card for You. Wait 48 hours. WAZ UP. WTC Survivor. A moment of silence. All Seeing Eye. An Internet flower for you. ASP hoax.

Baby New Year. Be My Valentine. Be Spooked. Big Brother. Blue Mountain. California IBM. Daisy Chain. Debug device. Don't drink too much. El Poco. Elf Bowling. Fighting Canaries. Flashmaster G. Flower for You. Get more money. Girl thing. Graphic file. Great Gas-Out. Hairy Palms Trojan. Happy New Year. Hello Dear. Help poor dog. Hey You. Honour system. Hooming G-Gnome. Internet Flower for You. It takes guts to say 'Jesus'.

Kali, see Lets watch TV. Lets watch TV. Londhouse AltaVista. Lotus Notes Worm. Moment of Silence. MPEG virus. Penpal Greetings. Phantom Menace. Pool Party.

Returned or Unable to Deliver. Sector Zero. Simon Pugh. Unavailable mobile phone. Upgrade Internet 2. Valentine's Greetings. Win a Holiday. Your friend D fit. Your friend is the scoutshacker. Blueballs Are Underrated. Free Pizza. Guts to Say Jesus. They are often used to slander companies or individuals and contain defamatory information with little or no factual basis.

The people who forward these messages are assuming that they are doing their fellow users a favour.

But by warning friends and relatives about supposed risks and dangers, they only unnerve or annoy them. Do not let the messages get to you. The senders of hoaxes are deliberately spreading false information.

Fake news are basically news which are made up and have no basis in facts. When they appear on social media networks and other platforms, they often appear legitimate if they imitate the look of a renowned publication. Fake news exist about celebrities, companies and even entire groups of people who are blamed for something negative. Just as in a hoax, the makers of fake news aim to provoke a strong emotional reaction in the reader by using surprising, outrageous or scandalous reports as their vehicle.

This has a purpose: if a person is scared or angry, he or she is more likely to believe a lie. If it confirms an opinion the reader has already had before, fake news become dangerous: through fake news, more and more people feel confirmed in their beliefs and they feel that they are not alone with their views. Cyber criminals have started using this mechanism to place phishing links or to distribute malware by enticing people to click on a fake news report.

Those who like, share or comment on fake news are not necessarily real users: social bots are programs which can control fake accounts on Facebook, Twitter and other platforms. In most cases, the profiles have a profile picture, a couple of friends in their friend list but nothing more. Be careful : Friend requests from someone you never have heard of might be an attempt to spy on your profile and to collect contacs in order to appear more realistic. Using specialized software, the operators can control thousands of these fake accounts and tell them what to do.

This can distort and falsify the overall opinion on the web and fuel discussions which ultimately serve their own needs. Is the message it contains actually true? Tell those who have sent you such a message about the fake content. This will stop rumours and fake messages spreading on the Internet. On the surface this does not sound like a terribly threatening or bothersome practice, but hoaxes, and those who choose to distribute them, can do real damage, both physical and mental.

Each message sent from a user's E-mail account, practical or superfluous, requires the expenditure of resources on the computer of origination and on every computer network it happens to pass through or into. Multiplied exponentially by constant forwarding and re-forwarding around the world, a single hoax message can result in huge overall energy drains. You, the end-user would experience this drain in the form of a slow Internet connection or low hard drive space on your PC or E-mail profile.

Physical damage like this is a nuisance at best; however, hoaxes have a more sinister effect on the computer users who receive them. Not only can hoaxes create personal anxiety and mass panic, but, when received in quantity by a single user, they can cause complacency. A complacent attitude towards the mail arriving in an E-mail account on a regular basis could cause a user to stop watching for the true threats posed by some E-mail messages e.