Why does anyone still believe the internet?

I don't get it, I really don't. Why do people, some of which I consider good friends, believe things they read on Facebook or other social media sites without fact checking the stories?

If you listen to my show regularly, I frequently use the phrase "everything I see online I assume is fake". Obviously this is an exaggeration, however when it comes to social media, I NEVER believe any "news" I read until I actually fact check it against credible sources. You've seen it hundreds of times.

Someone writes some ridiculous story like "The President drinks zebra blood before every cabinet meeting", and 2,597 people instantly share it on Facebook or Twitter without first thinking "hey, maybe I should actually see if this is true first before I share it"?

Last week a ton of my Facebook friends shared an article about how that social networking site was going to start using your phone's microphone to keep tabs and "spy" on you. I commented on a few of the shares asking "have you checked to see if this is actually true?". Of course, no one did. Yesterday Facebook released a statement saying;

“Here’s how it works: if you choose to turn the feature on, when you write a status update, the app converts any sound into an audio fingerprint on your phone. This fingerprint is sent to our servers to try and match it against our database of audio and TV fingerprints. By design, we do not store fingerprints from your device for any amount of time. And in any event, the fingerprints can’t be reversed into the original audio because they don’t contain enough information.”

And, no, Morgan Freeman had nothing to do with that quote ;)