Snopes Digest

View in Your Browser MEMBERS ONLY Snopes Digest 14 April 2020 • Issue #8 1 Copy-paste Confusion An old-school method of spreading misinformation rises once again. 2 Behind the Snopes Senior Reporter Alex Kasprak answers our questions about his process investigating claims. 3 Since We Last Met We have a number of big updates from Team Snopes. 4 In Case You Missed It The most popular and most important stories on Snopes.com lately. 5 Snopes-worthy Reads Good stories we’ve shared amongst ourselves recently. Issue #8 edited by Brandon Echter and Doreen Marchionni. 1. Copy-paste can cause confusion, Brandon. We’re assuming you’ve seen it a lot — a message copied wholesale onto the news feed of your friend or family member, with no attribution, sometimes with a call to copy and paste the message into your own feed to spread the word. In fact, without the design that you see when you use the share button, many times the only way you can tell that it’s a forwarded message is if you see it pop up more than once. Copy-pasting is decades olds, predating the “share” functions of our modern social platforms. In fact, a retweet was simply adding “RT” to a copied tweet before the functionality was built into the platform in 2009. Copy-pastes have always flourished — perhaps you remember these Facebook and Instagram pasted privacy notices — but now some of the most prominent rumors churning around the internet during the coronavirus disease pandemic are coming from such posts. The notion that COVID-19 is a bioweapon developed in a Chinese lab, for example, spread via copy-pasted posts. “Copypasta” continues to be a major, old-school source of misinformation. And we’ll keep checking it. Truthfully yours, Team Snopes Snopes-tionary Speak like an insider! Each newsletter, we’ll explain a term or piece of fact- checking lingo that we use on the Snopes team. Copypasta: It's not something you eat. A portmanteau of “copy” and “paste” (and a wink), copypasta is copy-and- pasted text shared online. Often its content pleads with readers to pass along some warning or advice to help others, when in fact it's just a bit of fiction meant to trick or embarrass the person who shares it. Some examples of shockingly effective copypasta fact-checked by Snopes years ago pop up in our inbox almost every day. 2. Behind The Snopes Let’s talk about what’s going on with Snopes: the newsroom, the products, the people, and everything and anything that makes Snopes, Snopes. Recently, Senior Reporter Alex Kasprak dove into a copypasta claim that SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID- 19, is a bioweapon. We asked him about his research process. What’s the difference between a story like this, that’s maybe a bit more complicated, and fact-checking a more straightforward claim? Kasprak: For some reporting or fact-checking, it can be quite simple to get started because you have a single concrete statement or claim that you are looking to confirm or refute. Sadly, that is not the case for a conspiracy about the cause of a viral pandemic. Those lending credence to the conspiracy theory that China created and accidentally or intentionally released SARS-CoV-2 from a lab in Wuhan are either genuinely misinformed, or are motivated by individuals or groups with agendas that reduce U.S. culpability for the growth of the pandemic, seek to blame China solely for it, or seek to push pseudoscientific claims about science, medicine, and “big pharma.” As such, the specific claims and evidence used to support them vary from source to source. What’s the first thing you do? Kasprak: In cases like this, I typically look to see if I can find central pieces of evidence that most of those making conspiratorial claims share. In this case, three bits of evidence appeared in most iterations of the “China released SARS-CoV-2 from a lab conspiracy”: A “scientific study” that concluded that “somebody was entangled with the evolution of 2019-nCoV coronavirus [and] the killer coronavirus probably originated from a laboratory in Wuhan”; a “scientific study” that argued that SARS-CoV-2 had “uncanny” similarities with HIV; and the testimony of a “bioweapons expert,” who has no first-hand knowledge of the virology or the study of disease, published on a pseudoscientific anti-vaccine website. Where did you really sink your teeth into this story? Kasprak: Each of those three pieces of evidence are almost comically flawed, so this is where I really like to dig in and attack the claims. That first “study” that concluded SARS-CoV-2 came out of a Wuhan lab was never published in any journal, and was instead uploaded to a platform to which literally anyone can upload a document. This “study” made the salacious conclusion based on what appears to be a web search for the terms “Wuhan” and “Virology” and a Google Map image showing how close a Wuhan disease control lab is to the wet market once thought to be the origin of the pandemic. It’s a glorified Reddit post that hangs its speculation on the misrepresentation of existing virology research, and it was later deleted by the author himself for its glaring lack of credible evidence. That second study that claimed to have identified HIV-sequences in the genetics of SARS-CoV-2 was also not a published [scientific] paper, but published on a server designed to offer authors comments and constructive criticism before publication. The paper fueled claims that the virus was “engineered” to inflict maximum damage on humans, but after others demonstrated the conclusion's weak support and erroneous conclusion, the authors retracted their work themselves. The final bit of “bioweapons expert” testimony, neatly enough, relied on the two debunked bits of evidence above. The interview with law professor Francis Boyle, published on a supplement website, asserted without evidence that “the only reason for these BSL-4 facilities” — i.e., the high-security virology lab in Wuhan — “is the research, development, testing and stockpiling of offensive biological weapons.” This is a claim several scientists — many of whom have colleagues who work with the Wuhan lab — told us was complete bunk. Did this story take more effort than usual to get right? Kasprak: I originally told my editors I could do this in a day and a half, but it ended up taking me something like four full days of work to hash out. A big part of the problem was assessing the credibility of the “evidence” used in that first paper. Most of the sources cited were either Chinese-language news reports or vague, ultimately incorrect descriptions of existing research. For example, the paper cited the fact that researchers associated with the Wuhan laboratory had, in effect, engineered a version of the SARS-1 coronavirus. An actual look at the paper published, however, shows that all of the lab work was conducted in North Carolina, and is therefore irrelevant as evidence for an accidental release in Wuhan. The other part of the story that took time to understand was the actual science refuting the notion the SARS-CoV-2 is an engineered virus. The scientific evidence is a bit hard to understand as an outsider at first. In essence the idea of an engineered disease is belied by the fact that scientists, based on what they knew before the outbreak, would have predicted SARS-CoV-2 to be a weakly infectious disease. Both the backbone of the virus and the genetic flourishes that make it so dangerous were unknown to science prior to its emergence. I spoke with researchers involved with this research as well as researchers unaffiliated with this research to make sure I accurately represented the scientific consensus on this point. Did this investigation take a turn you didn’t expect? Kasprak: I was most shocked by the weak “evidence” produced in that first study. The authors made a big deal about a Wuhan virology researcher who exposed himself to potential infection from bats while researching the unrelated hantavirus. In fact, that reporting came from a profile that lauded the scientist’s comprehensive fieldwork, which occurred hundreds of miles away from Wuhan in 2010-2012 and included his suffering one bat bite and one bat urination event. I remain shocked that people, including columnists at the Washington Post, still cite a paper arguing that being peed on by a bat nearly a decade ago is evidence that a bioweapon or research specimen was released from a Wuhan lab in 2020. More broadly, our understanding of the origins of the pandemic has now made the release-from-a-lab-theory much simpler to debunk. The evidence was based solely on the geographic proximity of virology-research labs near the wet market theorized to be the origin of the disease. We now know that SARS-CoV-2 infected humans prior to the wet market outbreak, that many of the initial cases had no contact with the wet market, and that the first reported case of COVID-19 was as early as Nov. 17. For a conspiracy theory rooted solely in geography, the fact that the outbreak did not actually originate near that lab should be the final death knell of the conspiracy theory. Sadly, of course, that has not been the case. This interview has been edited for length and clarity. You can read the full investigation here. Next time, you’ll hear from another member of the Snopes team about a unique aspect of working here that you might find interesting.

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