Hoaxes with Alex Kasprak

In this day and age, we are experiencing knowledge overload. There is information everywhere on the internet and social media. Add in the changes and hoaxes we are seeing pop up with the Coronavirus and it is harder than ever to decipher the truth. How do we research and check out this overload of information? In this episode, Alex and I talk about many strategies you can use to be more aware and make the best decisions for yourself and your family. 

Snopes.com is a great resource for fact-checking information you receive. Snopes.com does the research, cites its sources, and encourages you to do your own research. Alex shares the history of Snopes.com and how the mission and company have grown into the information giant it is today. 

Alex Kasprak is a science writer and investigative journalist at Snopes. Before joining Snopes, he wrote about science at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory and at BuzzFeed. His work has been featured in The Atlantic, Motherboard, New Scientist, and other venues. These days, his work generally centers around scientific misinformation and long-term investigative projects. 

Alex’s scientific background is in geological sciences. He has a master’s degree from Brown University, where his work focused on reconstructing environmental changes during a major mass extinction event by extracting molecular clues trapped in 200 million-year-old rocks. This research was published in the journal Geology in April 2015.

In addition, Alex has a master's degree in science writing from Johns Hopkins University. An adapted version of his Hopkins thesis essay was published online at The Atlantic under the title “The Desert Rock That Feeds the World” in November 2016.

When misinformation obscures the truth and readers don’t know what to trust, Snopes.com’s fact-checking and original, investigative reporting lights the way to evidence-based and contextualized analysis. We always document our sources so readers are empowered to do independent research and make up their own minds.

Show Notes:

• [01:25] - Snopes has been around since 1994. It started as part of the Usenet Group dedicated to urban legends. 
• [01:39] - David Mikkelson and his wife Barbara spun it off into Snopes.com.
• [02:04] - Now Snopes deals with social media misinformation, political stuff, and also investigative work. The mission and the size of the staff have grown over time. 
• [03:46] - Social media allows information to travel much faster than it used to through emails and other things. The tactics are always changing how misinformation gets around. 
• [04:40] - The most popular and most shared hoax on Snopes is the claim that posting something on your Facebook wall will legally prevent Facebook from using your material.  
• [06:39] - The underlying theme to most any conspiracy based hoax is that the government doesn’t want us to know this and is hiding it from us. 
• [08:52] - They often claim that the people debunking the myths are in cahoots with the people that are propagating the truth.  
• [09:22] - Hoaxes are designed to trick someone and are generally viral. 
• [09:53] - If a story feels too perfect for your personal or political viewpoints it is probably because someone is directly targeting you with that message. 
• [10:25] - The first thing to ask is does this seem too good to be true. 
• [11:20] - You can double-check most visual hoaxes by doing a reverse image search.