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MEMBERS ONLY Snopes Digest

31 March 2020 • Issue #7

1 There Are No Easy Cures This will be a long fight.

2 Behind the Snopes How to fact-check your friends and family, from people who do it all the time.

3 In Case You Missed It The most popular and most important stories on Snopes.com lately.

4 Snopes-worthy Reads Good stories we’ve shared amongst ourselves recently.

Issue #7 edited by Brandon Echter, Bond Huberman, and Doreen Marchionni.

1. Everyone is searching for an easy “cure” As the world deals with an ever-more-frightening pandemic, we at Snopes are seeing the resurgence of a classic form of misinformation: Rumors of snake-oil cures and junk medicine have roared into public consciousness, crossing social media feeds and even the White House podium, around the COVID-19 coronavirus disease.

The hope for a cure is understandable. It’d be great if one simple drug could eradicate COVID-19 and save lives starting now — better yet if it exists already in our medicine cabinets. In fact, the idea that the cure to our woes already exists has been around in fiction for a long time.

Unfortunately, a simple cure is unlikely. Experts believe that a COVID-19 vaccine might not be widely available for up to 18 months. And claims that the antimalarial drugs hydroxychloroquine and azithromycin can cure the disease are premature at best and a public health hazard at worst. This will be a long fight.

In this issue of the Snopes Digest, we’re focusing on junk “cures” and how you can protect yourself (and your family) from misinformation. Read on for more.

Stay healthy, Team Snopes

Snopes on COVID-19 Fact-Checking

We’re overwhelmed by misinformation around the coronavirus pandemic. We’re doing our best and taking care of our staff. But it’s up to platforms like Facebook and Google to tackle this problem for the long-term.

Read Our Letter

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.

Snake Oil: It's a popular metaphor that can describe almost any kind of fraud, but snake oil is defined by the Concise Oxford English Dictionary as "a substance with no real medicinal value sold as a cure-all." Ironically, the phrase itself can be traced back to a home remedy involving actual snake oil introduced to the U.S. by Chinese laborers during the 19th century. Apparently opportunistic sales folk who later peddled imposter snake oil (without any snake oil in it) inspired the phrase’s negative connotation.

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. This week, our staff share tips for being the “de facto” fact-checker at home.

Here at Snopes, a lot of time on the clock involves digging in and investigating the claims and tips you send our way. But off the clock, when we’re talking to our families and friends, a funny thing happens — we, like many of you, end up becoming the de facto fact-checkers for our social circle, sending Snopes ratings to new feeds, group chats, and text messages. Here’s our advice for fact- checking your friends and family:

Writer Bethania Palma: One of my friends and one of my sisters shared the hoax about a national quarantine. When I see members of my own inner circle sharing hoaxes like that, I assume that it's pretty much saturated the public consciousness. The way the text was worded, people were left believing that they had a personal connection to the information that was being shared. Be careful about forwarding unverified information during a crisis situation. Look to local government officials or established news outlets, and of course, check trusted fact-checking websites to see if it's a known hoax.

Writer Dan Evon: I think a lot of people may struggle to "fact- check" family members because they do it in an "I'm right, you're wrong" confrontational sort of way. Nobody likes to be wrong. But learning something new? Becoming more informed? Those are pills that are much easier to swallow. When fact-checking, if you know someone who dismisses Snopes or Politifact or The New York Times out of hand for perceived political reasons, try to show them information from government sources such as the CDC or WHO, or even the sources on the fact checks themselves — Snopes, for example, always lists our sources at the bottom of our fact checks.

Newsroom Editorial Assistant Liz Donaldson: I have been at Snopes.com for 15 years; my daughter is 19 years old. For a decade now she has started her conversations with "Is it true that ...?" or "Have you heard the one about ...?" She was disappointed there are no dolphins frolicking in the canals of Venice, but she quickly rebounded and forwarded me the plesiosaur meme.

Senior Writer Alex Kasprak: My mom frequently forwards questions from her group of friends regarding COVID-19 to me, most recently about the ibuprofen thing. Don’t trust anything that does not state their source, or anything that promises any cure or treatment for COVID-19. If you search Google using some of the text in a viral message and you see that some posts attribute it to one person and some to another, send that to Snopes because it’s almost certainly bogus.

Next time, you’ll hear from another member of the Snopes team about a unique aspect of working here that you might find interesting. Do you want us to cover something specific? Write to us here! Snopes-ing 101 Fact-check like a pro! Every newsletter, we’ll let you peek behind the curtain and see some of the ways we check shady information so you can check dubious claims yourself.

Making sure to not spread misinformation during COVID-19 is a responsibility we all share. We’ve assembled three easy tips:

Beware of second-hand stories. If a Facebook post describes something that a doctor or nurse purportedly wrote, and the person posting has no connection to them, it may contain misinformation.

While most of the country spends time inside, community websites like Nextdoor are perhaps more useful than ever. However, in staying connected with neighbors, be careful to not instantly share or believe misinformation about COVID-19. Always double-check the facts.

Check in on elderly family, friends, and neighbors, and tell them to be cautious of giving to fundraisers — whether online, by phone, by mail, or door-to-door. Some may be fraudulent. Check our scams section for the latest.

3. In Case You Missed It

The latest news and fact checks on Snopes.com.

The Great Toilet Paper Shortage of 2020 gave rise to a rumor claiming that retail giant Costco was recalling vast quantities of it because, allegedly, it was “contaminated with coronavirus.” Silly as that sounds, readers asked us to look into it. We did our due diligence.

Supposed home remedies for COVID-19 seem to be the order of the day, with people variously claiming that gargling with salt water or vinegar, drinking hot lemon water, or heating your nostrils with an electric hair dryer will conquer the virus. Our investigations found otherwise.

Hand sanitizer is as scarce as toilet paper these days, but that hasn’t stopped rumor-mongers from issuing warnings that ordinary name-brand hand sanitizers can sicken or kill pets. One such rumor that crossed our transom claimed that hand sanitizers contain an ingredient common with antifreeze, which is known to be quite poisonous to animals. Is it true? Read our full report here.

COVID-19 has so dominated news cycles that it’s almost refreshing to be confronted with a run-of-the-mill internet conspiracy theory. Case in point: A rumor claimed that Oprah Winfrey was arrested for pedophilia and her house seized by authorities. We were not surprised to discover the entire story was made up out of whole cloth.

We can’t blame anyone for seeking a silver lining amid the ominous spread of the coronavirus pandemic. But even when you look at the bright side of things, it’s important to sort truth from fiction. You may have seen reports that wild dolphins and swans had “returned” to the once cluttered and dirty canals of Venice after lockdowns. We can confirm that dolphins and swans were recently photographed in Italian waterways, but the rest of the story is, shall we say, a flight of fancy.

Have a story tip? Send it here!

Mental Health Break Team Snopes investigates some grim and depressing claims, so we know how important it is to your mental health to see something silly, funny, or just plain heartwarming. Here are some links that made us smile. It’s Easy to Feel Overwhelmed, But It’s Critical to Remember the Good, Experts Say - Maria Cramer, The New York Times

A Dog Doing Yoga - Twitter

Stray Cat Follows You into the Store and Guides You to His Fav Cat Food - Reddit

4. Snopes-worthy Reads

What Team Snopes is reading across the web.

Coronavirus: How Bad Information Goes Viral Olga Robinson and Marianna Spring, BBC News

Misinformation Telephone Renee Diestra, Slate

What This Chart Actually Means for COVID-19 It’s Okay to be Smart

How to Talk to Coronavirus Skeptics Ian Chotimer, The New Yorker

Why Do People Want So Badly to Believe this Fake Story is True? Rachel Bale, National Geographic

Have any recommended reads? Submit them here.

The Pets of Snopes It’s true: The Snopes “team” was once just two people and a cat. Twenty- five years later, we have more humans and more cats (and even some dogs) than at our once-humble beginnings. We want you to meet our furry, fact-finding friends because, well, who doesn’t love a cute animal picture?

Meet Writer Bethania Palma’s assistant, Buddy! Buddy is a former street dog turned fact-checking royalty. He loves to sleep, eat, sleep, make Buddy- sized forts in blankets, sleep … did we mention sleep? Thanks for reading this edition of the Snopes Digest. We’ll be releasing the newsletter every two weeks, so please add this email address to your white list and keep an eye out on April 14 for the next issue.

You can read the previous issue here.

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