hoax

Remember that time Brian Williams was shot down in a helicopter in Iraq?

Well now neither does Williams, and he is apologizing publicly for the erroneous story which he has been telling for years after being called out by some of the troops who actually were in the attack.

Sorry dude, I don't remember you being on my aircraft, said Lance Reynolds on Facebook. I do remember you walking up about an hour after we had landed to ask me what had happened.

He brought up the story in a news segment Friday about a tribute to a retired soldier at a New York Rangers game.

But crew members told the military news site Stars & Stripes that this never happened, and Williams issued a retraction.

I made a mistake in recalling the events of 12 years ago, Williams said on NBC Nightly News Wednesday. I want to apologize.

The soldiers of the 159th Aviation Regiments Chinook which was actually shot down claim Williams was in a helicopter that arrived an hour later.

I don't know what screwed up in my mind that caused me to conflate one aircraft with another. Williams said.

He later elaborated and apologized further in a Facebook comment:

You are absolutely right and I was wrong. In fact, I spent much of the weekend thinking I'd gone crazy. I feel terrible about making this mistake, especially since I found my OWN WRITING about the incident from back in '08, and I was indeed on the Chinook behind the bird that took the RPG in the tail housing just above the ramp.

Now people on Twitter have started a hashtag to shame him called #BrianWilliamsMisremembers, in which he claims he was part of some other major historical events.

The same chain-letter based hoax that floated around 2012 is back and scaring your family.

You might have noticed a flurry of action on your Facebook feed yesterday as people began copy and pasting what they believed was a legal notice, protecting the privacy of their profile data.

Stuff that looked like this:

So, that's totally incorrect. Facebook has not threatened to make public the data contained in profiles and no mention has been made to charge for an upgraded privacy setting. Trust us. Their making a killing just doing what their doing.

And even if they were, please do not believe that a status update will serve as a legally binding request to keep a business away from data that users are voluntarily putting on its servers. That's not how things work.

Luckily, not everyone took it seriously.

The messaging became so widespread that the company itself had to come out and warn users not to believe the hype.

So, there you go. Your stuff won't be made public and status updates aren't binding legal statements.

Have a lovely day.