| Ah, chain letters. If you were alive in the 1990s, you may remember their first digital manifestation (emails!), and now, as Bloomberg tech reporter Ellen Huet writes, you can enjoy the 2024 version: a viral Instagram post, pretending to be something serious and official about AI. It's not. Plus: What happened to India's stock market after Hindenburg Research accused the Adani Group of fraud. If this email was forwarded to you, click here to sign up. If you're an Instagram user, you probably spotted this as you flipped through stories last week: a block of text on an orange background, carrying a warning and a call to action—"Goodbye Meta AI." The message proclaimed that to prevent Meta Platforms Inc. from training its artificial intelligence systems on your data, you must post the statement. "Failure to do so may result in legal consequences," it continues. "If you do not post at least once it will be assumed you are okay with them using your information and photos."  Instagram To state the obvious, it's a hoax. Posting a message on Instagram does nothing to change your privacy settings. But it apparently isn't obvious, because hundreds of thousands of users took the viral bait, including celebrities such as Tom Brady, Julianne Moore and the singer Cat Power. It even spawned some videos mocking those who took it seriously. Snopes—poor, tired internet fact-checker Snopes—has attempted to stamp out the myth that social media users can post a message to protect their account from some perceived misuse … in 2012, 2019, 2021 and 2024. Yet it continues to skitter around the internet. Why do users keep falling for this? Probably because it's designed to hook directly into our brains. Chain letters work by striking fear in the reader, then offering salvation. (Spoiler: Salvation includes propagating the letter.) More than 100 years ago, per this excellent archive of chain mail, the strategy looked like a letter containing an "ancient prayer" and the warning that "he who will not say it will be affected by some misfortune." Fear not, for he who will send the prayer on to nine others "will, on or after the ninth day, experience a great joy." Today's fear is the shadowy threat of AI gobbling us up, and the salvation is clicking "share" on Instagram. "Chain letters have always been about a certain level of superstition, and about passing along bad luck through a new technological medium in a way that's a little bit scary and exciting," says Mar Hicks, an internet and technology historian. Computers and the internet have changed the form but not the function. Chains spread first via the postal service, then email, social media, text-message emoji-laden copypasta —and will continue via whatever spam-messaging nightmare we invent next. Their only goal is proliferation, with each of us as willing (or at least fearful) hosts along the way. Some jokes dismissed the most recent Meta-opt-out copypasta as boomer bait, but Gen Z is far from immune to digital superstition. TikTok is swarming with chain letters of its own—viral posts that warn that you must "interact 4x" or "save this sound" to avoid bad luck or romantic rejection. Hicks sympathizes with people who shared that "Goodbye Meta AI" post. Opting out of Meta's AI system is complicated, buried in policy documents and maybe even impossible in the US. The copypasta's virality makes it clear that a lot of users lack the technical literacy to understand the systems controlling their data. If they feel they don't know what else to do, it's understandable that they might turn to a legal incantation or a digital amulet to ward off unknown dangers. "People feel powerless in the face of larger systems," Hicks says. "They make up stories that help them feel a little more in control." | 
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