Fact-checking Ideas

So about those daisies. How can we check to see if this photo really shows what the tweet says it does - that these daisies growing near Fukushima after the tsunami and nuclear power plant failure were deformed by radiation?

Image showing deformed daisies in Fukushima, Japan

(@San_kaido)

Snopes

The web site Snopes.com Links to an external site. has been around since 1994. It may be the most well-known, English-language, fact-checking web site. It was originally created to investigate urban legends, hoaxes, and folklore, which makes it an ideal source for investigating claims like this.

To use Snopes, we should:

Re-read the claim about this photo

These daisies growing near Fukushima after the tsunami and nuclear power plant failure were deformed by radiation.

State that claim in simple terms

Daisies were deformed by radiation in Fukushima, Japan.

Pull out a couple of words from our simple terms; for example, choosing the least common words

daisies Fukushima

Go to Snopes.com Links to an external site. and search using those words: daisies Fukushima as shown in the example below.

Search results from snopes.com for daisies and fukushima

Once we get a result on the Snopes web site, we can click the title of the result to see more information about that claim. On the Snopes web site, we can then scroll down to find the rating for the claim.

Snopes result showing the claim is both true and false

The Snopes rating tells us that the photo shows deformed daisies in Japan. However, there's no proof that radiation from the nuclear plant is what caused this to happen. In fact, if we read the Snopes article a bit more, we'll see that there's a term for this kind of deformity (fasciation - meaning a type of mutation), and that there are many examples of fasciation happening to daisies that are nowhere near nuclear plants or radiation.

This type of critical thinking and research is not only for images or clickbait. Whenever we do research, we are responsible for this kind of detective work, for both images and written texts we want to use in our research projects.

Other Fact-checking Sources

Factcheck.org Links to an external site. - "is a project of the Annenberg Public Policy Center of the University of Pennsylvania." They "monitor the factual accuracy of what is said by major U.S. political players" and try "to reduce the level of deception and confusion in U.S. politics" (quotes from Our Mission: Factcheck.org Links to an external site.).

Politifact.com Links to an external site. - "is owned by the nonprofit Poynter Institute for Media Studies" but "started in 2007 as an election-year project of the Tampa Bay Times." Their goal is "is to give citizens the information they need to govern themselves in a democracy" (quotes taken from The Principles of the Truth-O-Meter: PolitiFact’s methodology for independent fact-checking Links to an external site.).

See the SCU Fact Checking Guide Links to an external site. for instructions on how to search Factcheck.org and Politifact.com.

Librarians - are people who are driven to find information and answer questions. They want to help us with our research, no matter what it is. Click the image below to contact the Highline College Librarians from their library home page.

@San_kaido. (2015, May 27). The right one grew up, split into 2 stems to have 2 flowers connected each other, having 4 stems of flower tied beltlike. The left one has 4 stems that grew up to be tied to each other and it had z ring-shaped flower [Twitter post]. The atmospheric dose is 0.5 μSv/h at 1m above the ground (translation). Retrieved from https://twitter.com/search?q=%40san_kaido%20fukushima&src=typd