You people will share anything

Viral is a word that, before the dawn of the Internet, had heavy-handed, medical connotations.

Before YouTube, viral meant “of or pertaining to a virus.” Now, it’s 2013, and “viral” has all but severed its medical ties, as it has been joined in the Oxford Dictionary Online by the likes of “derp,” “twerk,” and “srsly.” Today, when we say “viral,” we’re talking about the rapid spread of a video or an image across our Facebook news feeds.

Roughly a week ago, a video titled “Worst Twerk Fail EVER” made its way onto the web. It featured a blonde woman in yoga pants doing… what else? The video seems like a run-of-the-mill attention-seeker until things go horribly awry as the girl is tipped over onto a lit candle and proceeds to go up in flames.

The Internet, much like the woman’s pants, lit up. Hot off the presses of Miley Cyrus’s “performance” (I use that term loosely), the Internet could not get enough of this. Many web-goers blamed Miley directly for the video, and used it to preach about the dangers of twerking.

Others declared shenanigans early on and called the video fake, despite having no actual proof. In the meantime, mainstream media circuits including CNN, Fox, and MSNBC ran wild with the video, using it to fill airtime during a news week that was relatively slow if you don’t count the very real possibility of our country going to war.

Then, on Monday, Sept. 9, the entire lid was blown off the issue when late night talk-show host Jimmy Kimmel revealed to the world that the video was not only fake, but he had staged and filmed it two months earlier, long before Miley’s line-blurring debacle.

The woman in the video: Daphne Avalon, a professional stuntwoman. Kimmel expressed that he had made the video in hopes that it would put an end to twerking forever.

Besides the grammatical travesty that usually arises when “viral” is used in this online-centric context, when a video does spread, logic and reasoning tend to evacuate the building.

Ignoring the fact that he was actually doing little more than trying to garner views for his show, Kimmel exposed a sizable hole in everyone’s common sense in the form of viral marketing. A short, low-quality home video slipped past newsroom fact checkers and editors nationwide.

Avalon, by doing little more than going by the alias Caitlin Heller, fooled both close friends and family who had even recognized her face in the video.

Sure, this all may have been in good fun but this begs the question, what else do we let slip by our B.S. detectors on a daily basis? How much of the news that we see is actually news?

When something goes viral, most people tend to suspend their disbelief and just go along with the hype.

If people on Facebook want to hop on the bandwagon, that’s fine.

News outlets, however, should not be doing this. The fact that cat videos and people twerking can make it into a news broadcast at all kills me a little inside.

When ridiculousness starts to seep through the cracks into our mainstream news, getting accurate information becomes more and more difficult. When accuracy in reporting becomes a problem, retractions have to be made, and conspiracy theories begin to form.

There’s a reason why most people don’t take Fox or CNN seriously: at a point, it all becomes more fluff than substance.

So before you hit that “Share” button, do us all a favor, and triple check your facts first. Snopes.com is your friend.

I mean, it’s not like you believe everything you read in the newspaper, right?