Pete’s blog

This week’s email is dedicated to everyone who used a flimsy rumour of an impending tornado in Jo’burg to leave work early on a Monday.

Firstly for all the overseas people and those of you who were doing work and missed the fuss, the story of the tornado hoax. On Monday 8 October 2007 an email began circulating warning that a tornado was expected to hit Jo’burg later that day. Naturally everyone panicked, left work and packed the roads. The result: massive traffic jams, no work done and no tornado. When I heard about this (being unemployed I wasn’t in the thick of it), I nearly died laughing. Then I started wondering how in this information age people would rather rely on rumour and speculation than hard facts. A quick visit to the South African Weather Bureau would have shown a severe storm warning, but no tornado warning. Most of the news services carried stories dismissing the hoax. And in case you thought it was completely silly, you would also have found out that Jo’burg has experience tornadoes in the past, in fact one in 1948 killed 6 people and injured 100.
So why do people believe and then forward on an email without first checking to see if it is true? This question covers spam mail, chain letters, the collapse of Northern Rock bank in the UK and conspiracy theories, but is by no means a new phenomenon. Hearsay, rumour and mass hysteria have long been features of the human psyche – what has changed is the speed and distance covered. One single email can circle the globe in a day, mutating and evolving to cause the maximum response. And once the email has been created it never dies, resurfacing again and again in different forms. Even though in the time it will take your 10 friends to read and forward the email, you could have instead done some quick research and found out it was a hoax…
There are five forces at play here. Firstly the “what if it were true” force. Humans are generally optimists – they like to believe in things. So if an email warns of an impending tornado, people will think “what if this warning is true”. Even if it is a less than 1% chance, there is still that small chance that it might happen. Why take that chance?
The second is the “rumour makes it true” force. Once a rumour starts it can become self-fulfilling and you would therefore be a fool to ignore it. The run on Northern Rock Bank is the classic example. The fact that the bank was theoretically sound meant nothing. The possibility of there being a run on the bank was enough to create a run on the bank. “Pump and dump” share traders use this force to make massive amounts of (illegal) money. Buy a cheap share, create a rumour that the price is going to skyrocket, the price skyrockets, you sell the shares and the price plummets once the truth takes hold again.
The third is the “of course they will deny it” force. This is the backbone of any conspiracy theory – the government denies it, therefore it must be true. Of course the South African Weather Bureau is going to deny that a tornado is coming, they don’t want to cause a panic. Of course Northern Rock is going to say nothing is wrong, that don’t want to have a run on the bank. The official denial ends up supporting the rumour.
The fourth is the “this guy said so and he should know” force. The inclusion of expert testimony is a normal feature of conspiracy theories, however email hoaxes have added a new dimension to this. One of the factors in the tornado scam was the fact that one of the emails came from someone working at Netcare 911. Just some pleb who forwarded the email, but the forwarded email now came from a “@netcare.co.za” address. This immediately added weight to the rumour, with the email evolving to say “Netcare has issued a tornado warning”. Of course it doesn’t have to come from the company for it to appear to have come from the company. Email is very easy to “spoof”, ie. make it appear to have come from a different address. Phishers use this to scam people into giving them their bank details and passwords.
The last factor is the result of the information age – too much information. With so many different information sources available, who do you trust, who do you believe, where do you look? It is much easier to believe something that comes to you in your email, instead of something you have to go and look for. In school we are trained to believe and accept what we are told, rather than finding out the truth for ourselves.
Together, these forces make email rumours almost unstoppable. In fact you would be stupid to ignore a rumour, because you are guaranteed that a very large number of people are going to respond to it. However I would advise you to think very hard about how you do respond. The tornado email did come true as it predicted mass chaos on the roads, fortunately however the tornado did not come true as the panic could have increased the fatalities. Next time you get a tornado warning think for a moment where you would rather be – out in your car, or in a reinforced concrete office? And always remember, by the time you hear a rumour it is too late – a million other people have already heard it and responded.

Oh, and in this high-tech information age, if you really want to quickly and easily confirm whether a tornado is likely – why not spend some time outdoors getting to know the weather instead of reading your email