This is a public service announcement.
The world is filled with an awful lot of bullshit. More often than not the internet is the source of that bullshit and yes, we see the irony of the fact that this is coming from an online only media source but bear with us for a second.
Remember when you were young and were just starting to get involved in football fandom and all the highs and lows that goes along with it. You'd read a Sunday tabloid and see that 'X' was going to sign 'X' player (believe it or not, that did happen before twitter came along and ratcheted up the nonsense tenfold).
You'd get excited about Roberto Baggio going to Man United or whatnot only for your youthful exuberance to be dented when such a situation never came to pass. Whether you learned it yourself or had to be told by someone else, you quickly should have copped on to one of life's key lessons, 'don't believe everything your read'.
Fast forward to the age of the internet and the proliferation of constant information and entertainment. At the best of times it's a truly glorious thing. At the worst of times it's Conor McGregor's 'response' to Floyd Mayweather's racism dig 'going viral'.
As one popular twitter account would put it, 'get in the fucking sea'.
That screenshot is courtesy of a reddit user who caught it at 174,000 likes, 31,000 comments and 25,000 shares. It only increased after that. It was seen by millions upon millions of people over the past 24 hours or so and it was read as fact. While we were asleep it would seem that quite a few media outlets, including Fox Sports in Australia, jumped all over it.
The Fox story has since been removed but the page is still there with the url reading 'conor-mcgregor-ruins-floyd-mayweather-in-brutal-response-to-racism-claim'. The Facebook profile in question is, of course, not that of Conor McGregor.
The UFC featherweight champ does tend to be rather open with his social media presence so perhaps it's easy to see why people were so ready to believe the wonderfully eloquent prose that can be seen above. However, unlike reading the News of the World back when you were young, it's altogether easier to spot what is bullshit and what is not when it's coming from a Facebook account.
The fact that this account in particular has 1,171 friends would indicate that it's probably not Conor McGregor asking Floyd Mayweather if he'd like a pad or a tampon. At least the incognito James Joyce will be able to up that friend count over the next couple of days.
We'll leave the last word to John Kavanagh.
@GavanCasey @TheNotoriousMMA @FloydMayweather no cure for stupid.
— Coach Kavanagh (@John_Kavanagh) January 6, 2016
