In March 2019, a poster of “Company Policies” spread on Facebook (archived here) and other sites, purportedly illustrating draconian — yet believable — rules for employees at an unidentified company: Many versions of the image appeared to come from Snapchat, with a circled portion around “sick days” and a comment: “This part tho .. wth.” The …
A February 28 2019 Facebook post (archived here) shared the image reproduced above with the following text: I shared this picture a few minutes ago, then about 5 minutes after I shared it, the post was removed from my page and also from the page of who I shared it. The statue represents a guardian …
Guardian Angel Crying at the Cradle of an Aborted Fetus? Read More »
On March 3 2019, a Canadian Facebook user shared a “public service announcement” about a purportedly bizarre and new strain of streptococcus aureus going around (post archived here.) The poster referenced a second post of hers (archived here) about the purported strain of strep, as well as a February 26 2019 post by a woman in …
Is a ‘Bizarre New Strain of Strep’ Causing a Rash and Infecting Sinuses? Read More »
On March 16 2019, the Facebook page “Blossom” shared a video entitled “8 mind-blowing transformations you can do at home!” to its page and to Facebook Watch. The video raked in a massive 58 million views in just a few days, and its claims were big ones. In a series of DIY/hack montages similar to perplexing …
8 Mind-Blowing Transformations You Can Do at Home? Read More »
In March 2019, two viral Facebook posts circulated with an image of an alarmingly inaccurate “Why Did Slaves Come to America?” worksheet. The viral Facebook posts were part of a larger controversy in February and March 2019 about myriad incomplete, deeply inaccurate, and outright misleading school lessons on slavery in various places across the United States in …
‘Why Did Slaves Come to America?’ School Worksheet Read More »
A long-circulating meme suggests that the “praying” emoji is definitively a “high five,” and a common iteration (seen above) shows a search for the term “highfive” with commentary such as “y’all be high fiving people’s deaths.” The origin of the meme is not clear, but it makes the rounds on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and other …
On March 14 2019, the Facebook page “Pictures in History” shared an image (archived here) with the following status update: Unwanted babies for sale in France during World War II, 1940 This wasn’t this particular group’s first such outlandish claim. In late February 2019, the page shared a widely-reposted image purportedly showing wives engaged in a “Christmas tradition” of …
Is This a World War II Photograph of Unwanted Babies for Sale in France? Read More »
Late on March 12 2019, a Twitter user shared a link (archived here) to an unavailable tweet and claimed that beauty YouTuber James Charles called them a racial slur: In a follow up tweet (archived here), the user reiterated the claim. Those images continued circulating into the morning of the following day, and users described Charles …
Did James Charles Use a Racial Slur in Twitter DMs? Read More »
In March 2019, the following meme appeared (archived here), containing a claim that Brooke Shields had been photographed suggestively for Playboy magazine when she was just ten years old: The image featured a heavily made-up small girl who looked quite a lot like Shields and an inserted image of Playboy founder Hugh Hefner covering her presumably naked …
Was Brooke Shields Photographed for ‘Playboy’ at Age 10? Read More »
In early March 2019, a Facebook user shared a screenshot (archived here) of a tweet sent the same day, which admonished followers of a scandal involving the Kardashian family. That post claimed that while readers were busy on Kardashian gossip, two-thirds of the Earth’s animals were in the process of being eradicated by 2020: lmagine if …
Will Earth Lose Two-Thirds of its Animals by 2020? Read More »
