A family member had an e-mail from a friend today containing a forwarded chain e-mail - the "forward this e-mail to your friends and Bill Gates will give you $1,000" one - the "it's been featured in USA Today and Good Morning America" variant, to be precise. I quickly found the relevant Snopes page debunking this old e-mail.
My standard thing is if I get things like this (which I only rarely do), I send out a polite reply-to-all explaining that it is a myth and pointing people to the Snopes page, and warning people to be careful not to believe everything they read in their e-mail. The Bill Gates e-mail is stupid, but I fear that otherwise well-meaning people are going to fall into things like 419 scams, or be proxies for sending around viruses and trojans. Said family member was not wild about doing this - why risk a good friendship over a stupid e-mail? This got me thinking about whether my response is the best one.
This anecdote sticks out:
My girlfriend tried the "respond-rationally-to-the-forwarded-rant," complete with citations, snopes articles, logic, the works. It sparked a family-wide freak-out, with cousins writing her telling her what a horrible horrible person she was... The long and short of it - their response to the emails was along the lines of "you obviously hate Freedom and should move to Canada with the rest of the Communists."
In aformentioned family member case, someone else on the To: line sent out a reply-to-all saying words to the effect that it's a hoax and to Google before you send them out.
What's the etiquette for this kind of debunking? How do you respond to them? Is it ever successful? Of the people I get these things from, it's a very persistent minority - and even when they get the full Snopes, reply-to-all treatment, that rarely stops them from sending out the next idiotic hoax they get. How do we solve this without turning into anti-social arseholes?
