The initial post was about "weird red lights" over the Atlantic Ocean, captured in photos purportedly taken by an airline pilot. Huh. But it is posted by National Geographic, so I look more closely.
There are tells:
1. Broken English. I have no trouble with people learning English. I've learned French, and I'm sure I still sound broken in many ways when I use that language. But I expect National Geographic to do better than me.
2. The redirect. The photos/story aren't available at National Geographic, but at another website entirely.
So I know immediately this is not National Geographic despite the name.
Their "About" page is even sketchier:
1. This is a "Group by Wonderae."
2. The welcome message is to "National Geography," the group was created this summer, with the name changed almost immediately when they realized the "National Geographic" group name was up for grabs.
This has all the appearances of a junk science enthusiast trying to nail onto Nat Geo's coattails for fame and fortune.
The real National Geographic is on Facebook, viz:
Reporting this to Facebook will do absolutely nothing. They do not care. Because 99.99% of the they vetting all this information is an algorithm or a bot and not a real human, and these tools are nothing but tools in the tooly sense: They won't notice that one group is masquerading as the other, so nothing will happen. National Geographic might get snippy, but even then it'll probably take a while to get this fake group off social media. And if that happens -- that's if, becuase it's iffy Facebook will do a damn thing about this -- they'll just find another way to spread their junk science.
Facebook, you suck.
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