Can we teach critical thinking and good digital citizenship practices if we don’t use them ourselves? I’m asking because every week I see another educator in my social networks share a Facebook scam. Here are the last two that I saw shared by people who have administrative roles in schools.
- A posting by a page titled “Official Patriots Nation” that promised to give season tickets to a random person who shared a post. A quick look at the page itself would tell you it is not the official New England Patriots page. You can tell because there isn’t an official Facebook verification check on the page. The other giveaway is that the only posts on the page were posts promising to give away tickets. No legitimate Facebook page exists just to give away expensive products to random people.
- A posting from a page that claimed to be Ellen Degeneres giving away money to people who shared the post and wrote “money” in the comments. This scam is particular laughable because the person who created the page didn’t even spell Ellen’s name correctly. If that wasn’t enough to make you suspicious, the first line of the posting is “Warning All!!! this is not fraud.” That has the sound of a used car salesman saying, “this is a great car only driven by an old lady to church on Sunday!”
Please, if you work in education, stop sharing scams on social media. It just makes us all look bad.