For the last few days, hundreds of Egyptians have fallen in love and filled with laughter after a young woman’s random Instagram story about a “space rocket barbeque” went viral.
Young Sarah Abou El-khair posted on her Instagram stories a wild story on how NASA, or SpaceX, could help “end world hunger” through an “ingenious” cooking alternative.
Ever since then, the young “public figure” (as titled on her Instagram) has gained almost national fame. With her story filled with screenshots of famous celebs and companies asking for her hand, it seemed like a crazy movie plot come to real life.
Which in the end was closer to the truth.
Abou El-khair has since then announced that the entire thing started off as a fun joke between friends, that quickly spiraled into a social experiment on how fragile our online world is by showing how fast fake news can spread.
Learning a hard lesson
Even after all of this year’s scandal with fake news and social media’s influence on people, we see that the lesson has yet to be learnt. Hundreds to thousands of locals quickly fell for the fun joke between friends turned social experiment.
This year’s major scandal was Facebook’s Cambridge Analytica breach, read more on Facebook-Cambridge Analytica data leaks: Mark Zuckerberg admits mistakes!
The main poster of the post seemed to be in on it as well, as he posted 3 days later about the Instagram story’s truthful origin.
It’s important to see just how easily the internet can be manipulated with a few works on Photoshop and a few shares. At the very least, we can see that the post was truly a reminder in just how much fake news there is on the internet, and how easy it is to blend in with the truth.
