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A guy in a Facebook group told me my go-to source for checking viral claims was garbage, and he was right
I used to just screenshot whatever Snopes said and call it a day whenever my aunt sent me some wild claim about a recall or a scam. Back in June a guy in a fact-check group pointed out that Snopes had retracted or updated a couple entries I'd been linking, and he told me to always click through to the primary source at the bottom instead of trusting the summary. Now I pull the actual FDA notice or court filing before I tell anyone something is fake, and it's saved me twice already. How many of you actually read past the summary on these sites, or am I the only one who was lazy about it?
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young.thomas17d ago
Man, this hits home. I was the same way for years, just trusting whatever the top result said and moving on. The thing nobody tells you is that even good sites get stuff wrong sometimes, or the story changes after they publish, so that summary you shared last week might be totally outdated now. What really got me was learning how many of these claims start as a tiny grain of truth that gets twisted, and you only catch the twist by reading the actual notice or filing yourself. Once you start doing that you also notice the primary source often says way less than the summary claims, which is its own kind of eye opener.
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