Facebook photo showing Powerball can end US poverty is dead wrong
Jan 12, 2016, 9:55 AM
A lot of people are hyped about the Powerball and who can blame them? The jackpot is well over $1 billion, the largest lottery prize in world history.
But with that hype comes plenty of misinformation online, particularly on social media. On Monday, a photo claiming to show how the Powerball prize could effectively end poverty in the United States went viral.
[fb_embed_post href=”https://www.facebook.com/Livesosa/photos/a.382473485681.164111.92833735681/10153842869785682/?type=3&theater/” width=”620″/]
The image has been shared hundreds of thousands of times and has even turned into a talking point around office coolers. After all, who wouldn’t want to solve poverty and make everyone a millionaire?
There’s just one, tiny little problem with the photo, however: math. It turns out that $1.3 billion (the jackpot has since grown to nearly $1.5 billion) shared between 300 million Americans would give each person a whopping $4.33.
As in your typical cup of Starbucks. As in not solving the nation’s poverty issue.
The artist that posted the original photo, Livesosa, followed it with another post about 12 hours later.
[fb_embed_post href=”https://www.facebook.com/Livesosa/photos/a.382473485681.164111.92833735681/10153844017515682/?type=3&theater/” width=”620″/]
Of course, this post references Steve Harvey and his epic screw up at the Miss Universe pageant and makes it clear the post is nothing more than a joke. But because the Internet is the Internet, the second post was only shared about 2,300 times.
Consider this your daily reminder, people: You can’t trust everything you read on Facebook.
