http://www.science20.com/robert_inventor...con-222221
EXCERPT: As some of you may know, I've become deeply concerned, and indeed appalled by the large numbers of fake doomsday news stories, because I am so often contacted by people who get very scared and sometimes suicidal as a result of reading these stories. Fourteen tabloids and other papers have published this story so far, and none of them mention that it originates from a site known to publish fake news. The story is that the world is going to end because of two snowy days in Salento in Southern Italy, which they say is a prophetic sign of an imminent massive supervolcano eruption. I think it is a particularly striking case of doomsday news based on chinese whispers starting off from a fake story. There is not the slightest shred of a scientific reason for connecting two snowy days to supervolcano eruptions, as any of my readers with a scientific background will know. But stories like this scare young and also vulnerable people, who do not know how to evaluate them....
EXCERPT: As some of you may know, I've become deeply concerned, and indeed appalled by the large numbers of fake doomsday news stories, because I am so often contacted by people who get very scared and sometimes suicidal as a result of reading these stories. Fourteen tabloids and other papers have published this story so far, and none of them mention that it originates from a site known to publish fake news. The story is that the world is going to end because of two snowy days in Salento in Southern Italy, which they say is a prophetic sign of an imminent massive supervolcano eruption. I think it is a particularly striking case of doomsday news based on chinese whispers starting off from a fake story. There is not the slightest shred of a scientific reason for connecting two snowy days to supervolcano eruptions, as any of my readers with a scientific background will know. But stories like this scare young and also vulnerable people, who do not know how to evaluate them....