I’ve long been an advocate of fact-checking, which is why I often am accused of being a “damn librul.” Sure, I’m liberal on some matters, but I’m conservative on others; very few people are all liberal or all conservative. Facts don’t have a party (but if they did, it’d be my kind of party: boring, and with little to no talk of politics … woo hoo!).

No one, it seems, is immune from passing along hoaxes on Facebook, which is why hoaxes like the one that says Facebook changed its algorithm to limit your feed to the same 25 or so people keeps popping up and spreading. Ramya Sethuraman, a product manager who works on ranking at Facebook, said on its news page, “The idea that News Feed only shows you posts from a set number of friends is a myth. The goal of News Feed is to show you the posts that matter to you so that you have an enjoyable experience. If we somehow blocked you from seeing content from everyone but a small set of your friends, odds are you wouldn’t return.”

Facebook’s algorithm is based on your interaction with posts; if you don’t comment on or like a certain person’s posts, after a while, their posts will creep lower down in your feed, while posts from people you more frequently interact with will be near the top (which is why my feed is dominated by my brothers and school and work friends … and cats … and sci-fi … and words).

Hey, I know what I like.

From my observations, hyperpartisans seem to have more of a tendency to post hoaxes of a political nature, and dig in like you wouldn’t believe on some of the more outlandish ones. According to yourbias.is, that would be the result of belief bias (similar to but not quite the same as confirmation bias, which focuses more on the information and its source than conclusions made from the information): “If a conclusion supports your existing beliefs, you’ll rationalize anything that supports it. It’s difficult for us to set aside our existing beliefs to consider the true merits of an argument. In practice this means that our ideas become impervious to criticism, and are perpetually reinforced.”

That digging in? It’s called the backfire effect, and it’s a monster that will reinforce beliefs despite evidence disproving them. So, yeah, if your third-cousin twice-removed posts something brimming with misinformation (which might or might not be labeled as such by Facebook, as recent reports allege that an executive overruled third-party fact-checks to prevent certain outlets such as Breitbart from being deemed repeat offenders), maybe just hide/mute that post instead of wasting time and blood pressure medication trying to share facts. Some people refuse to listen (or follow terms of service, which is usually why social media platforms ding them for posts, not because they’re being politically targeted; platforms, like your neighborhood store, have the right to refuse service for not following rules).

Not all of the fake news shared on Facebook gets a fact-check attached to it. Here are a few of the hoaxes that have recently made the rounds:

🙏🏻 Facebook prohibits posting of the Lord’s Prayer (or any religious content).

This hoax has been around since at least 2014, and has been debunked repeatedly, but it keeps coming back … like that spicy sausage you really shouldn’t have eaten Saturday night. Carmel Kookogey of USA Today wrote last month: “Like most social media platforms, Facebook’s community standards do not explicitly protect the Lord’s Prayer, or any other specific religious text. Instead, Facebook defines prohibited speech as any ‘direct attack on people based on … religious affiliation,’ among other protected characteristics. … Facebook does not prohibit the Lord’s Prayer. Moreover, many religious pages on Facebook have posted the Lord’s Prayer, are titled ‘The Lord’s Prayer,’ or exist for the purpose of praying the Lord’s Prayer. Those pages continue to be live and public on Facebook. Further, a Facebook community group titled ‘The Lord’s Prayer,’ with 8,158 likes and the full liturgical text in its bio, is currently active on Facebook. ”

Many of my friends’ posts contain Bible verses and prayers. I even watched the sermon from my church back home on Sunday on Facebook. So much for a ban.

💉 Bill Gates is planning to microchip everyone with the vaccine for covid-19 when it’s developed/holds a patent on the virus and the vaccine/owns or is a partner in the lab where the virus was produced/is evil incarnate.

Sigh. If it’s not Bill Gates, it’s George Soros (who still is not paying people to protest), or Barack Obama, or Hillary (or Bill) Clinton, or whatever seeming liberal (as a rule, it’s almost always a liberal) has offended the poster.

Jane Wakefield of the BBC reported in June: “Some accuse of him of leading a class of global elites. Others believe he is leading efforts to depopulate the world. Still more accuse him of making vaccines mandatory, or even attempting to implant microchips into people.

“‘There are myriad conspiracies surrounding Bill Gates,’ said Rory Smith, from fact-checkers First Draft News. ‘He is this kind of voodoo doll that all these communities are pricking with their own conspiracies. And it is unsurprising he has become the voodoo doll—because he has always been the face of public health.'”

Professor Joseph Uscinski, a political scientist at the University of Miami and author of books on conspiracy theories, told Wakefield he believes Gates is a target is simply because he is rich and famous.

“‘Conspiracy theories are about accusing powerful people of doing terrible things,’ he told the BBC. “‘The theories are basically the same, just the names change. Before Bill Gates, it was George Soros and the Koch brothers and the Rothchilds and the Rockefellers.’”

Any tiny kernel of truth, such as the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation donating funds to research or to combat disease, is taken out of context and stretched beyond recognition as a way for people to make sense of a situation.

Too bad those theories make no sense.

🍕 There is a global satanic elite child-sex-trafficking cabal involving apparently every liberal in and out of Hollywood that is obsessed with harvesting adrenochrome/eating babies/trafficking kids using menus involving pizza, hot dogs and other symbols out of nonexistent pizzeria basements.

Does child sex trafficking exist? Unfortunately, yes, and it has for years, but there is no evidence that these wild conspiracy theories are true. Worse, as Annie Reneau of Upworthy points out, politicizing the trafficking issue and/or tying it to kooky conspiracy theories hurts the cause of fighting it, as energies are then directed toward false narratives. Legitimate anti-trafficking organizations like the Polaris Project or Operation Underground Railroad might have their hot lines tied up with reports about, say, Wayfair supposedly selling children on its site (it’s not) , and not be able to answer calls about what’s happening in reality.

Reneau writes: “No matter our political, religious, or ideological leanings, the unfathomable hideousness of child sex trafficking is something all of us should be able to agree on.” And we should agree that using trafficking as a whataboutism to distract from a political issue, or to advance some conspiracy theory with no proof, is just misguided and wrong.

⚰️ Florida reduced its covid-19 case count by 79,000 because the CDC had been counting pneumonia and flu cases as covid-19, according to a failed congressional candidate who claimed to have proof.

The way hospitals report covid-19 information was changed recently, says FactCheck.org, with information on capacity, equipment and testing data going to the Department of Health and Human Services instead of the CDC. However, the CDC still receives mortality data directly. The CDC said there have been no major revisions to Florida’s numbers, and the rerouted information is unrelated to case surveillance or death counts.

In an Agence France-Presse fact check, Claire Savage wrote: “The Florida Department of Health office of communications told AFP by email that Florida cases are reported when ‘covid-19 is listed as the immediate or underlying causes of death or listed as one of the significant conditions contributing to death.’ They are also reported if a Florida resident had a confirmed covid-19 infection within 30 days of their death and cause of death is not explained by alternative events like ‘trauma, suicide, homicide, overdose, motor-vehicle accident,’ for example.

“‘We’re not combining pneumonia deaths with covid-19 deaths,’ [National Center for Health Statistics] Chief of Mortality Statistics Bob Anderson told AFP over the phone. He clarified that while people can die of pneumonia they developed because of covid-19, and both illnesses would be noted on their death certificate, their deaths are only counted once, as covid-19.”

Of that 79,000 number, Anderson told FactCheck.org, “I’m not even sure where those numbers come from. They seem to have been pulled out of thin air.”

Which is apparently where proof of that claim resides, as it has yet to be produced.

🦠 Donald Trump tweeted in 2009 that he “would never let thousands of Americans die from a pandemic while in office.”

The ersatz tweet starts: “Obama’s handling of this whole pandemic has been terrible! As President, ALL responsibility becomes yours during a crisis like this, whether or not you’re entirely to blame.” While Trump has tweeted some things that didn’t age well (like that the electoral college was a disaster for democracy, or calling for a march on Washington after the “travesty” of the 2012 election), he didn’t tweet this, despite Facebook posts saying he did. FactCheck.org found no tweets in the Trump Twitter Archive matching that statement; he only tweeted 59 times in 2009 (that would be a relief now).

It’s not like it’s hard to fake a tweet; there are websites that will let you do just that. This is just one more that was too good to be true.

👍🏻 👎🏻👍🏻 👎🏻👍🏻 👎🏻

Don’t take any of this as a defense of Facebook. There are still many things I don’t like about it and the people who run it, but it does serve a good purpose by connecting people.

Those of us using the platform should remember, though, that hoaxes help no one, and we should check information before we post to make sure it’s real.

Fear is a big part of why hoaxes have such a long life. Information is a great way to defuse that fear. Read a newspaper (like the one I work for), read and research beyond the headlines on Facebook and other social media, and don’t fall for satire, even if it sounds like it could be real (helpful hint: Andy Borowitz and The Onion are both satirical).

And hit mute on the hoaxes. It helps. Well, it helps keep you from strangling people, anyway. Which will keep you out of jail.