Rants, Raves, and Rhetoric v4

Tag: snopes

  • Facebook should honor those privacy notice hoaxes

    I’ve seen several friends post the new variant of the notice saying that in order to have privacy, you have to post the note that does not give Facebook permission to use your photos or status updates. Here is the thing. Taking away that permission makes Facebook unusable as no one can see them even…

  • Fact Check: Akon Lighting Africa

    Saw a friend posted a photo claiming Akon had provided solar power to 600 million Africans, but the media was not going to tell you about it. It also questioned what is it the NGOs are doing. This was an amazing claim, so I went looking into it. “Akon solar power” led me to his…

  • Crowdsourcing Bias Identification

    Zittrain’s set of tweets was interesting reading. 23/ There's more beyond "like" and "share" to help people looking more for information than fun help examine their own assumptions. — Jonathan Zittrain (@zittrain) November 15, 2016 Lots more on it: best, 1, 2, 3. There is an interesting plug-in called Media Bias/Fact Check which will help show…

  • Research BEFORE reacting

    A friend posted this article on Facebook, Everything wrong with this country happened this morning on my Facebook page, which showed an image with the original erroneous claim. The reactions to it were agreement with the bogus claim. Which was extremely sad because the originator of the claim now refutes it. The whole point of the article…

  • Image Search

    Google has a cool tool, Google Images, which can search images. Provide it text, and the images returned will have related metadata or page information to your search. Now, for the really cool part, you can search based on another image. Click the camera icon in the search bar and another box appear. Enter a…

  • Alienating Friends Through Correcting Misinformation

    Snopes is your friend. Even if you cannot remember the site, searching for a sentence of a text probably will pull up a hoax clarification site. Facebook is the new chainletter forwarding medium. The share button allows people to very easily and simply pass along anything. Often this is before they do anything to verify…

  • Ya know… I never trusted one-way mirrors. People who use a public toilet enclosed in one-way mirrors obviously do. Sick? Disturbed? Not gonna do it! (Thanks, Valya, for weirding me out!)

  • Snopes has to be one of my favorite web sites. I like finding out whether something is true or false. For instance, finding out the claim “Arab/Islamic states consistently vote against the U.S. in the United Nations” is more or less true. My SocialGrid Profile Snam = Social Network Spam? Interesting….