The family group chat, a field guide

A forward is a message somebody passes on without writing it. Astrology forwards are one of the steady arrivals in a family group chat, and they come in three common kinds.

The eclipse warning gives a date, a list of things not to do, and a line saying this has not happened for a hundred years. The part you can check is where the eclipse can be seen from. An eclipse is visible only from a strip of the earth, and NASA lists the regions for each one. Eclipses are not rare either. NASA's catalogue counts 11,898 solar eclipses over five thousand years.

The auspicious window is a coloured graphic with a good time range on it, say 11:04 am to 12:39 pm. The common windows in Indian almanacs are cut from the local sunrise and sunset, so they shift from city to city. The sun reaches Kolkata about an hour before Mumbai. A graphic that names no city is printing somebody else's times.

The quote card is a photograph with a sentence in quotation marks and a name underneath. A citation you can follow gives a book, a chapter and a verse. A card gives a name and nothing else.

Some marks show before you read a word. The claim sits inside a picture, so it cannot be searched or corrected the way a sentence can. The app labels it Forwarded, and after five or more chats, Forwarded many times. No author, date, city or source appears on it. It asks you to send it to a set number of groups, which is what chain letters have always asked for.

The calm reply is simple. Answer the person first. Take any correction to a private message. Ask one real question, such as where this eclipse can be seen from, and look it up together. Do not use the words fake or superstition, because they land on the sender rather than the picture. Leave the family's customs alone. You are checking one claim about the sky, not inspecting a household.