A roundup of some of the most popular but completely untrue stories and visuals of the week. None of these is legit, even though they…
A roundup of some of the most popular but completely untrue stories and visuals of the week. None of these is legit, even though they were shared widely on social media. The Associated Press checked these out. Here are the real facts:
CLAIM: Side-by-side photos circulating widely online as part of the ’10 Year Challenge’ purport to show the nearly complete deterioration of a portion of sea ice from 2008 to 2018.
THE FACTS: The photos, which aim to show the effects of climate change, are of different ice formations and have been falsely captioned. They have been shared more than 200,000 times as part of the “10 Year Challenge” meme, which started on social media to show how something or someone has changed over 10 years. But the comparison uses two completely different ice formations, on different ends of the Earth. One photo, labeled as being from 2008, shows the Getz Ice Shelf in Antarctica. It was taken in November 2016 by Jeremy Harbeck, a NASA scientist, during a research flight for NASA. “In 2008, I was not even working on this project,” Harbeck told The Associated Press. The other image, taken in 2018 by Julienne Stroeve, an ice scientist with the University of Manitoba, shows a remnant of ice in the Chukchi Sea, part of the Arctic Ocean. “This picture is really misleading,” said Stroeve, who said she took the photo while collecting data about ice positions in the summer. “You can’t just cherry pick individual years. You have long-term change happening.” Harbeck’s photo was used Monday with an AP report about a newly released study that found ice in Antarctica is melting more than six times faster than it did in the 1980s.
CLAIM: ‘Tlaib and Omar co-sponsor bill to recognize Muslim holidays as federal holidays’
THE FACTS: The first two Muslim women elected to Congress did not co-sponsor a bill that would federally observe Islamic holidays, as numerous posts circulating online suggest.
