I remember growing up, during those years where anything seemed possible, a kid at school started talking about Nostradamus and how this guy had all of these crazy predictions and that they actually came true. For a kid, that was some trippy stuff. There was no point in actually trying to read up on Nostradamus and there was no internet to turn to for Snopes, meaning that we all just believed this kid and turned to him to see what kind of other crazy stuff he had read about. Even if the internet does have a lot of resources nowadays, people still don’t use ’em as much as they could. Pranksters still run wild and there will always be a subsection of people that just say “whoooooa.”
According to Mashable, one crafty Facebook user, Pablo Reyes, decided to freak out his friends through good, old-fashioned internet trickery and it worked. My god did it ever work. What were his predictions? Celebrity deaths, mass shootings, the death of gorillas. This guy was hitting all of the marks and doing it in stride.
But before you get blown away at the timestamp of December 26, 2015, there’s trickery at play here and it’s easier than you think. Here’s the thing; if you click the little arrow to the top right of a post on your timeline you are given a slew of options, including changing the timestamp and editing the post in general. So, for example, I could go back and edit my sharing of a certain article about one Guy Fieri on my timeline to make it looked like I predicted that I’d post said article on said date, or make it say something else entirely. Usually it’s for those of us that may have made a spelling or grammatical error and want to fix a post, not to fool the world.
So no, there is no Facebook Nostradamus. Instead, there is just a clever person looking to have some fun and people who want to believe in something more. Essentially, what we have is humanity. If we look at the Pablo Reyes edit history on Facebook it tells us a different story.
Instead, the original post was about white people taking selfies with tornadoes. So there you have it, now you know what you can do with Facebook and yes, we fully expect you to start pranking your friends with this. That’s just how the internet works.
(Via Mashable)