“A fake coupon for a free bag of Doritos has gone viral, leaving consumers angry when they can’t cash it in, retailers holding the bag if they do redeem it and Frito-Lay dealing with damage to its image. The scam problem has increased in the past few weeks as more and more people e-mailed the coupon to one another. And though a $5 bag of chips may not sound like a big problem, Frito-Lay spokeswoman Aurora Gonzalez said the losses could end up in the multimillions: The dollar value of fake coupons submitted in recent weeks equaled 5 percent of Frito-Lay’s real coupon offerings for all of 2009, she said.”
Pretty funny, huh?
This wasn’t the con of some “Nigerian Prince” trying to get his hands on your bank account. And it wasn’t the work of a Doritos addict hoping to pig out. This was, like a lot of malicious gags on the web and off of it, the invention of someone who sought amusement by making other people look foolish. Before the internet, such people were limited to a couple of victims at a time at most, or maybe a few more if you were rich and puckish, or had a newspaper or radio station at your disposal. Putting a “Kick Me” sign on the office dork is pretty tame stuff, all things considered; not kind, but not especially vicious either. The same people who would have been hanging such a sign on a colleague decades ago, however, now can use the web to create tricks that are more creative, meaner, and will reach more dorks. So can the kind of idiot who once got a charge out of placing yellow police cordon tape around a neighbor’s home, and watching him freak out in terror when he returned from work.
Most web hoaxes are harmless, just as most hoaxes anywhere else are harmless. Because the web goes everywhere, however, the chances that otherwise harmless hoaxes will mutate into harmful ones are multiplied exponentially. “Going viral,” in the case of hoaxes, has added significance. A misrepresentation that the target audience will understand and appreciate is likely to find its way to someone who takes it seriously, and maybe a lot of of someones. This is predictable. What is often unpredictable are the consequences.
The Web has not been around very long, and is still sorting out its ethical values. Respectable people still think using the internet to fool, trick and deceive people is legitimate sport, and equally respectable people defend them passionately and well. I know the arguments, heaven knows; I’ve run into them like a log running into a buzz saw. But the Doritos scam is one more example of how what one person thinks is merely harmless, “Let’s fool gullible people online!” fun can be destructive and troublesome beyond any justification. I would like to think that just as society stopped thinking driving drunk was a useful skill, that throwing trash onto the highways wasn’t cool and that pinching secretaries in the derriere was just a privilege of management, the online culture will come around to regarding all deceptive uses of the internet, even ones that turned out to be harmless, clever or funny, as unethical.
I think the sooner we stop encouraging the harmless hoaxes, the fewer harmful ones we’ll get.
Ethics Alarms 