Wednesday, November 1, 2017

"Only 4% of the population can answer 75% or more of these questions about Rock n Roll correctly! How many do YOU know?!"

I keep seeing these "Suggested Posts" (advertisements) on Facebook that say something like "Only 4% of the population can answer 75% or more of these questions about [...] correctly! How many do YOU know?!" With questions about Hollywood stars or geography or history or whatever. People I know on Facebook keep clicking on these links, and commenting that they got 90 or 100% and that this means that they are experts on the subject in question.

So does this mean that I know a lot of geniuses on Facebook? On the contrary, unfortunately, it means something quite different: it means that these websites put together a bunch of very easy questions, and then just outright lie about only a small percentage of the population knowing most of the answers -- they just make up a small figure -- and they make these lies into ads on Facebook, enticing people to take the tests in order to be told how smart they are.

What are these sites selling? Ad space. People click on the ads on Facebook, and then click 15 or 30 more times to take the quiz and be flattered about how brilliant they are.

This is to the present day what junk stocks and bonds were to the 1980's. I'll bet that a lot of the very same people who sold junk stocks and bonds back then are running these websites today. And I'm getting pretty tired of it.

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