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Not all “Facts” sites actually use facts

9/22/2014

 
by Cherry Teresa

On social networking sites such as Facebook and Twitter, several pages with "Facts" in their names have an impressive number of followers and shares . The fact is, many "facts" sites are filled with hogwash. People who otherwise fact check before spreading nonsense are quick to share these posts. I wonder if having the word "facts" in a name makes some people more trusting of it.

A popular assertion made on these "fact" feeds is that strangers in your dreams are actually people you've seen before in real life. The claim is that our brains can remember people we may have only briefly encountered once in our lives but cannot make up original images of people's faces. This sounds fascinating, but the only references I could find that agreed with this, aside from other "facts" pages, were sites related to psychics and astrology - two "junk science" fields. And they did not cite their sources.


A collection of tweets:
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    SWIFT is named after Jonathan Swift, the author of Gulliver's Travels. In the book, Gulliver encounters among other things a floating island inhabited by spaced-out scientists and philosophers who hardly deal with reality. Swift was among the first to launch well-designed critiques against the flummery - political, philosophical, and scientific - of his time, a tradition that we hope to maintain at The James Randi Foundation.

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