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For those (very young people?) that don't understand the headline, there were several hoaxes about Bush's intelligence when he was the president of the US. Depe

• dragonwriter 6y ago
  > I wonder how it spread globally considering social media wasn't a thing in the early 2000s. The terminology changed (up into the period when FB became doninat, the term was usually “social networking” rather than “social media”), but the category has been going strong since the late 1990s. But non-“social networking” web pages, email (including mailing lists), usenet, were also in play. Widespread communication via the internet didn't start with modern social media.
  • mkl95 6y ago
    From a social networking perspective, I grew up in the era of chain emails, and social media took over when I was in my teens. There was an awkward moment in the early 2010s when some people were still spamming others with chain emails even if they were asked not to do it (which is oddly similar to what happens on Twitter when you reply to many people). What amazes me about this hoax is that I'm from a country where English isn't widely spoken, but somehow many people knew about this hoax and believed it (possibly due to having a different sense of humour than, say, a British person, who is more likely to see it as a joke).