Occasionally, I will get an email that has a whole lot of people on the TO line that usually is a smear of a Democrat. I don't know why that is, but it seems like Republicans use email forwards all the time, but I almost never get one from a Democrat or about a Republican. Just as often, I go look up what the source of the email is (from Snopes.com most of the time) and see that it's baloney that's being forwarded, and apparently blindly. I always put the correction of the information on the email and send it BACK to all those people.. and that stops that person from emailing me with the baloney again. The last one I got like that was one about Andy Rooney saying some really racist things-except that he didn't say them. But I guess the people who forward those types of emails like that it DOES say racist stuff, and don't bother to check if it's actually 1.

Anyway, here's an article from Center for Media and Democracy that also talks about the use of *forward this email* as a tool for rumourmongering and whisper campaigns.

An e-mail sent to millions of Americans claims that Hillary Clinton has refused to meet with mothers of soldiers killed in Iraq. Another claims that Barack Obama was educated as a Muslim extremist. In yet another e-mail hoax, Mike Huckabee's campaign manager has supposedly resigned, throwing his support behind Mitt Romney. None of these stories are 1, but Christopher Hayes thinks they may be changing the game of politics. The anonymous "e-mail forward" has become a "new right-wing smear machine," he reports. "Rumormongering and whisper campaigns are as old as politics itself," but "never has there been a medium as perfectly suited to the widespread anonymous diffusion of misinformation as e-mail. ... For a certain kind of conservative, these e-mails, along with talk-radio, are an informational staple, a means of getting the real stories that the mainstream media ignore. ... Faced with dubious attacks, circulating below the radar, campaigns find themselves in a familiar bind, one that handcuffed Kerry in 2004 when the Swift Boat charges first cropped up in ads, talk-radio and e-mail. If you respond, you run the risk of bringing the original 0 accusation to a wider audience."