Bob CollinsStand down, Minnesota; there’s no big snowstorm coming on Monday. And anyone who tells you otherwise is spending far too much time on Facebook.
The culprit is Facebook’s feature which shows you something you posted a year ago. Someone — we don’t know who you are — reposted a WCCO story about the pending storm, according to the station.
It seems to have started with one of Facebook’s new features that reminds you of a “memory” of one of your posts on this day in the past few years. A few of our viewers were reminded of the day last year when they shared our article from 2014 about the coming snow storm.
A few others saw their friends share the story, but perhaps misunderstood that it was a “memory.” Or maybe someone shared the post without a few words of context, even further confusing things.
Eventually, a few people shared the story thinking it was recent, and a few of their friends shared it from there, and things began to compound.
“A few” in this case means tens of thousands of people, apparently.
The station says in just one day this week, the “old” story about snow got more traffic than the top stories of the year, including stories about the arrest of a person of interest in the Wetterling case, and the Minnesota dentist who shot a lion.
Why do TV stations hype the weather? That’s why. People love this stuff while insisting they don’t.
The actual weather next week will be rainy with temperature in the 50s, which will be valuable information to have next year around this time.
