So a while back Plastic Assets surfaced, a faux credit card company purporting to offer “free breast implants with every card,” and “free lip injections for every friend you refer.” The site was an entrant in the Contagious Festival, a contest at The Huffington Post to create high-traffic parody sites.
According to this CanWest News Service article, Plastic Assets was designed by Shari Graydon, author of In Your Face: The Culture of Beauty and You and Canadian media critic, who was troubled by the number of people who appeared to be fooled. She said:
“Women who are willing to undergo breast implant surgery and to play Russian roulette with their health are relying on information that’s pervasively available but not very credible” …
“The degree to which our site was believed to be credible despite how over the top it was underlines the fact that people aren’t bringing critical thinking skills to what they read on the Internet.” …
…”It was quite depressing to see how many people bought into it some of them extremely educated people who you’d think would’ve brought greater skepticism to what they were looking at,” says Graydon, who has spent the past few days e-mailing everyone who signed up for the credit card.” …
The site now directs visitors to a top-10 list of “reasons to avoid breast implants like the plague,” and a database of information on breast augmentation hosted by the National Research Center for Women & Families.
The Museum of Hoaxes had a different reaction, which was:
“…I’m skeptical about how many people really were fooled. I don’t think there’s any correlation between the number of visitors the site had, or even the number of applicants it received, and the amount of people who believed it to be real. I figure that most of its visitors recognized it as a joke, and probably filled out the application as a joke also.”
