When in doubt, GOOGLE IT!

IF ITS TOO GOOD TO BE TRUE, IT PROBABLY IS A LIE.

Topic: Internet Safety
I absolutely can't stress the topic of online safety enough, well neither can myspace but do you really pay attention to what myspace says every damn where you leave comments?

"Warning - Please be aware that MySpace is accessed by thousands of users every day; since you do not know every user on the MySpace site, exercise caution when posting personally identifiable information."

Anyway that's just an example, and not exactly the topic of my discussion.
Think about all of these things-
How many online friends and acquaintances do you have?
How many of them have you seen pictures of?
How many of them have you talked to on the phone?
How many of them have you met in person?

Despite any of that, my final question is, how many of them are you SURE ARE what they say?

The internet is the easiest place to lie, and/or spread lies, no one has to worry about facial or verbal expressions being read by the other person, its SO DAMN SIMPLE to make it seem you're something you're really not. You only have what someone says as 'proof' of what they are, nothing beyond that except your own thoughts about it, the first of which you can't change, but the latter you CAN change, and I believe the best way to stay SAFE is to judge things in a logical way instead of based on your impulse and need of belief. Reason I'm posting on this site is that a lot of people say they're vampires and other crap they want someone else to believe(no offense to the real ones, this is simply directed at the liars) and guess what, you actually believed them at least to an extent when all the logic in the world screams at you not to.
As for the pictures part, networking has made it so simple to have thousands of online 'friends' for someone and once they're on your friend list, you have access to all their pictures, which means an online predator would have access to a hell lot of pictures that aren't his own, but he can easily use as his own on a site like this(among many others) which is far away from myspace, facebook and such networks.

I'll put in an example from my experience.
Whitney
She's 30, happily married, with two kids. She meets a person on a popular social networking site. The guy claims to be a vampire, he tells her things he wants her to believe. He tells her he knows about her, things like he can fly and all that, yet gives NO reasonable proof of him being a vampire, or even of his very existence. Two weeks later, he is supposedly dead and she is possible the cause of it for interacting with him and she feels threatened by other "vampires" not to mention STILL obsessed with her friend.
She usually video chats with new people soon after meeting them, yet she has never heard his voice at all. She tries to trace his emails and they reveal a completely different location than he said. His pictures are revealed on Google as of someone else's.
Yet months later she continues to try to find if he did indeed exist and about the 'danger' she faces.
The flaws in Whitney's logic would be, that she believed someone who didn't give her an ounce of evidence that he was anything CLOSE to what he claimed to be. Even after finding out he lied about his own pictures, she still 'believed' him. Even after finding out he lied about his location, she still wants to believe him.

The reason this is so would be that it's supernatural, something out of the ordinary, something everyone craves for knowledge of. But there is a darker side to it, because the supernatural is the "unknown" to most, there are various possibilities as to what one might believe, which makes it easier for a liar to manipulate someone and bend their beliefs.

But... if you think about your own self first, and be RATIONAL when it comes to judging new people. It's not a bad thing to question, it's how you learn, if you don't question for yourself you become puppets in the stage of life.
This is where Google comes in, Google(and mostly wikipedia) are where most liars get there info from. Not to mention popular movies/tv shows and books, and actually also the not so popular ones. If anything someone says/claims to have written something and you have an inkling of doubt that it isn't them really speaking, GOOGLE IT! Install the google toolbar,( http://toolbar.google.com/ ) set it on 'open searches in new tabs' It will only takes a second of your time that way to double check on liars.
If you prefer to use other search engines like Yahoo!, Bing or Ask, then go for it, Google is just one popular example. It's actually sometimes a better idea to check for stuff on more than one search engine if you're suspicious of or doubt anything.
However Google search is just one step, people often use their wild imaginations or related stuff that might not show up on Google, so the logic part is important as well.
For more info search on Google for 'online safety' or 'internet safety'.

I don't mean to offend anyone with this, not even the liars and fakes, because if someone is manipulated its a two person game.. only one to play best wins, my discussion is simply something for the defensive side in this game to learn from :p
Thanks to anyone if you read all of that.. haha bonus points if you Googled what I wrote to know if I indeed wrote it ;)


~Alex