Welcome. Thank you for participating in our little experiment. We apologize for wasting your valuable time. You may return to your previous page now. Click on the little arrow top left on your browser. The one pointing left.
In case you feel manipulated, betrayed or simply confused, here is a short FAQ you might find useful:
- What was all that about?
This is an independent and totally unscientific survey, trying to figure out how easy it has become to manipulate somebody over the Internet. You followed a link prompting you to come here because it was supposed to be “sensational” – or whatever. Curiosity prevailed and here you are, seeking for “The whole truth” (as the title of this post advertises). Well, there’s not much truth here to tell you the truth, just the curiosity to measure other people’s curiosity.
- That didn’t help me feel less angry
Well, maybe there are other reasons in your life why you feel so angry, please don’t blame us for that. We were just fooling around, imagining that such an experiment would be interesting and – perhaps – useful. To us only – whatever that’s supposed to mean. We don’t intend to sell your IP or anything, chill out.
- I still don’t get it
The whole concept is that we count the hits on this page, we see where they came from and we satisfy our curiosity by analyzing completely boring statistics, until we can feel justified enough to draw a totally arbitrary conclusion and publish it somewhere else.
- Why?
Because it seemed a good idea at the time, OK? And also because the way social media influence people can be pretty important, don’t you think? Or do you honestly believe that this was the first and only time you got manipulated by somebody to follow a specific link? You should be thanking us for not popping out any online casino windows or installing a bunch of trojans in your system.
- Sounds fun. Mind if I share this link?
Please do so, that’ the whole point. But remember, we would appreciate it if you kept secret what the content of this page really is. Just prompt other people to visit this site and we promise not to try and make money out of it. You can blog it, post it on Facebook, tweet it, or place it in a forum. You can even SMS it if you like, but please don’t start spoiling our little secret.
- Anything else I can do to help?
If the whole thing turns successful, it would be nice to have this text translated in many languages. Please e-mail us on influenza.experiment@gmail.com or leave a comment. You could even apply to be a contributor if you like. It’s a bit like an open source program.
- One last question: What’s with the “influenza” business in the URL?
The word “influenza” refers to a virus spread, which – metaphorically – is what’s this is all about. Also, it means “influence”, the ability to have people do something simply because they trusted the original source that told them to do so. Of course it’s not a coincidence we decided to call it that way during a global pandemic alert (or whatever else you want to call the H1N1 “swine flu” panic). As for the word “experiment”, well, it’s pretty obvious…
