There are many great things about the Internet, none of which come to mind at the moment, but I’m almost positive that they exist. One of them, however, is not the prevalence of group think and mob rule. It tends to happen a lot that you’ll post something completely innocuous one day, and by the same time the next day, you’ll have had 50,000 angry nerds sissy slapping at your front door, threatening to pound you senseless with their nonexistent muscles and weapons made out of plastic. Trust me, I’ve been writing on the Internet for a great many years now and do not have any scars or bruises whatsoever to prove it.

So it went this past weekend, when the following image you are about to view started to make its rounds along the Information Superhighway and inspired a whole heaping helping of CAPS LOCKED misspelled outrage, as unsourced, unexplained photo images posted out of context are wont to do from time to time. Open both your eyeballs and try your very best to not knock over your computer monitor with your fist and/or shoe, as monitors are prohibitively expensive to replace.

And you can see why it caused so much consternation. What a terrible policy for McDonald’s to have instituted, charging African-Americans an extra $1.50 per transaction because of an increase in robberies. This is an outrage! We’ll take this straight to the CEO of McDonald’s, Ronald McDonald himself, and heads are sure to roll! This is totally on the level and in no way or form could have ever been falsified! Look at that letterhead. It very clearly says McDonald’s on it. And the logo! And some of the words are italicized and bolded! How could anyone possibly fake that? THAT TAPE LOOKS PROFESSIONAL.

So anyway, because everything is true on the Internet, the webizens took to the Twitter and demanded an explanation from McDonald’s for this horrible new national policy of theirs that they taped to some random McDonald’s entryway. Choosing to forgo the obvious reply of, “This is a joke, right? You people can’t possibly be this stupid no matter how much lard we’ve inhibited your neural pathways with,” McDonald’s Corporate instead posted the following to their company Twitter:

“That pic is a senseless & ignorant hoax McD’s values ALL our customers. Diversity runs deep in our culture on both sides of the counter.”

Because if there’s one thing that defuses a ginned-up Internet flame war, it’s corporate speak. Also, did you know McDonald’s had their very own culture? I was not aware of that previously.

So naturally, the day continued and people still kept screaming at them, when they weren’t attempting to call the number on the sign and discovering that it was actually the customer service number for KFC, and then screaming at them instead. So McDonald’s tried tweeting a few more times to see if they’d shut up before giving up and letting them rabble rabble rabble themselves into a deep slumber. And now the whole thing’s been forgotten about by everyone except me, who needs it for a cheap and easy subject for a blog post a couple days after the fact. The morale of the story is that you shouldn’t believe everything you read on the Internet.

Except for everything I just wrote that you just read. Because how could I possibly make any of this up?