Evaluating and Controlling Technology Snopes

Evaluating and Controlling Technology Thanks to the internet, and the subsequent growth of social media, people can interact and share information widely and instantaneously. However, this ability to disseminate and share information has also led to the proliferation of fake news. As a matter of fact, over time, various fake stories, false rumors, and urban legends have been circulated widely – effectively misleading readers and distorting the true nature of various facts.

Towards this end, quite a number of fact-checking websites have been created with an aim of countering the said urban legends, political spin, as well as fake news. One such website is snopes.com (www.snopes.com). In essence, Snopes fact-checks urban legends and related stories to determine their validity and authenticity. The website, according to Fleischman (2014), “devotes scholarly diligence to rumors, photos-gone-viral, and other statements that often pass for fact in popular culture” (p. 181).

Over time, the website has fact-checked thousands of stories, debunked myths, and uncovered hoaxes and widely-circulated falsehoods.

One of the fake news items the website has disproved in the recent past is reports that Dasani, a product of the Coca-Cola company, has been recalled due to contamination by what the purveyors of the said news referred to as a ‘clear parasite.’ According to stories widely circulated over the internet, and more so in various social media platforms, the Coca-Cola Company was forced to issue a major recall of its flagship bottled water product after the parasite was found lurking in the bottled water distributed for sale to consumers.

One of the many websites that gave validity to this particular story is womansvibe.com, a website that states its mission as bringing “awareness to women of all generations and different cultures” (Woman’s Vibe, 2018). The website in this case reported that hundreds of people had already fallen ill after consuming contaminated Dasani brand water, with most of those rushed to hospital exhibiting “parasitic symptoms such as vomiting, fever, rash and stomach bloating” (Woman’s Vibe, 2018).

Other websites that carried this fake news item include, but they are not limited to, fitbodycenter.net, demicmedia.com, and healthyhouseideas.com. According to Snopes, the origin of this particular fake story was a website going by the name News4KTLA (Snopes, 2018). To make the story appear even more authentic, the story was accompanied by an image that purported to show the hand of a man holding the clear parasite. The image appears to be authentic and the worm appearing in the image appears realistic.

In seeking to calm the public, the Coca-Cola Company issued a statement at the time to the effect that there was no recall whatsoever of the bottled water brand and that the alleged clear parasite was an elaborate hoax (Snopes, 2018). Similarly, Snopes points out that the Food and Drug Administration denied any knowledge of such a parasite in Dasani water (Snopes, 2018).

It is important to note that while some of those spreading fake news and urban myths are aware of the false nature of the said stories, others innocently spread such fake stories without verifying their authenticity. A site like News4KTLA, which was identified as the originator of the clear parasite story, specializes in the spread of fake stories on purpose and according to Snopes, the said site is “a clickbait site that mimics the appearance of a local television station’s online arm”.