Hoax

Dear Lucas,

One of the greatest things you have in your generation is the freedom to reach the widest audience possible for whatever you want to express. By the time you can manage to fully manipulate your computer’s mouse or bang away at the keyboard, I’m sure that whatever form the Internet will have it will be more accessible, more sophisticated and will simply be so awesome in depth and reach.

But, great as that may be, you will be vulnerable to the threat of doing more harm than good. There will be many instances when what you think is fun will cause much pain.

Just yesterday, Papa received an email of what it claimed to be a warning to women. It contained a story about a girl being raped inside a plane of a major airline enroute to Manila. Right there it set off an alarm in my head since it was something that never saw reported in mainstream media, aside from the fact that the story claimed to have happened way back in 2005.

So I Googled it and in turn went to the trusty hoax buster, www.snopes.com and saw that it was indeed nothing but a hoax. The sad thing about it was there were some discussion forums (or is it for a) where some members were already up in arms about it. A needless rise in blood pressure.

More unfortunate is the fate of the so-called source of the story – the one whose name and contact info was on the bottom of the email. One of your uncles managed to find her on Facebook and she denied authoring the email. We believed her, simply because the original email, as revealed in the earlier editions, was from a different source and this young lady whose identity is in the latest incarnation of the hoax email is just a result of its indiscriminate forwarding.

There are thousands of other such hoax emails like the alleged recovered photos of a passenger from within a crashing plane which turned out to be scene stills from a TV show, or even a supposedly inspiring story of a boy’s perseverance to recover from his mangled face and eventually growing up to be Mel Gibson, or virus alerts that claim certain normal computer system files are deadly viruses waiting to pounce on your computer thus you should delete them.

Many of these have been small practical jokes that have cause no major harm except using up bandwidth as they bounce around the Internet (on the other had, their volume may be more harmful to efficiency than we think). But some hoaxes like the “plane rape” are so serious that it damages reputations and destroys livelihoods and lives. So serious that the airline named has warned that the email is libelous and that forwarding it makes the sender subject to legal action.

Yes, my son, at this point in the Internet’s life the law is catching up with the technology. Computer forensics and the nature of the technology itself has allowed law enforcement to track down those who upload materials to what server, those who forward the material… there is an electronic paper trail and footprint, and it is traceable.

Take a look at the story of that journalist who was killed in Pakistan, Daniel Pearl. It was amazing how the police were able to trace the guys who uploaded the photos of his captivity – to the very unit of the crowded housing buildings. (Of course it was more exciting watching how they did it in the movie A Mighty Heart starring Angelina Jolie.)

And, not far from home, our very own National Bureau of Investigation (NBI) was able to track down and arrest the guys to uploaded the Hayden Kho – Katrina Halili video which – I must emphatically state – I have not seen nor intend to see ever.

As of late, there is a test case in court for libel. This is for the blog written by a girl who claimed her father and brother were beaten at a golf course by some politicians and their body guards. How the justice system will handle that remains to be seen, but the result is sure to be precedent setting.

The point is, Lucas, that by the time you are old enough to enter cyberspace you will have more freedom and, yes, even more responsibility. You will be more empowered than any generation to live your life to the fullest, but at the same time it will cost you more should you choose to live that life disregarding its effects on others.

I pray that when you type out your own blog or receive messages that say “please pass” or “forward” you will take time to think, assess and not hesitate to delete or tell the source to take it back.

All my love,

Papa