Tag Archive for 'Rumors'

Don’t Feed Rumours


“A lie gets halfway around the world

Winston Churchill‬

IF YOU Google the phrase “Middle East rumours”, the first link that pops up is not, as you might expect, a website propagating conspiracy theories. It is Coca-Cola’s website. For several years now the company has struggled to rebut ridiculous rumours about its products.

For example, some people believe that if you read Coke’s Arabic logo backwards, it says: “No Muhammad, No Mecca”. Others insist that the company is owned by Jews, or that it bankrolls Israel. These rumours are one reason why Coke does worse than Pepsi in Arab countries. Yet they are all false, as Coke’s website explains in painstaking detail.


By restating the rumours, Coke helps to propagate them.


The reason is because as information is passed around, important qualifiers are lost.


In several experiments, Mr Rucker and Mr Dubois planted rumours among undergraduates. They found that with each repetition, scepticism diminished. The rumours themselves did not change; only the likelihood that the students would believe them.


Other companies could learn from this. McDonald’s hamburgers have been said to contain worm meat, Procter and Gamble is reputed to have Satanic links and Facebook is rumoured to be shutting down so that its founder, Mark Zuckerberg, can have his life back. All these rumours are utterly false, but the firms in question would be well advised not to bother denying them.

This problem is exacerbated with the Internet and it’s indexing methodology – giving weight to the number of referenced pages, not their quality, thus making a bad situation worse.