Debunking e-mail

Everybody receives questionable e-mail, especially if you're on a municipal e-mail list like RBmail. Some folks apparently relish forwarding all the sensational mail they receive, especially during a political campaign. Some even admit their mail might contain false statements and leave it up to you to prove otherwise. Have you noticed that it's usually the same people that send out false information? This makes it easy to block their mail. But how do you debunk e-mail?

Everybody is familiar with Snopes that gained the reputation as the Number 1 fact-finding site. It was created in 1995 by Barbara and David Mikkelson, a couple from California who married after meeting on a newsgroup. The name "Snopes" comes from Faulkner's novels as one of his most corrupt fictitious family.

Snopes attempts to debunk or confirm widely spread urban legends and is often referenced by news media. Spammers like to reference it falsely to give their message credence so you've got to be careful. Snopes is also wrong on occasions and has been accused of being biased both to the left and to the right in political debunking.

An interesting site that not everybody knows about is Snopes Message Board at http://message.snopes.com/. After seeing Snopes' opinion on a claim one can go to the Message Board and see what others think. It's pretty neat and if you register you can post your opinion. There are about 100 topics with discussions going on. It's a good idea from Snopes.

This is the Number 2 debunking site in my opinion. They claim to be non-partisan, something that is questionable about Snopes, so it's a good double-check on political claims. On their main page you can see the top 10 stories, which are the ones you probably just received in your e-mail inbox, like the recent rumor that Joe Biden dropped out as a VP candidate for medical reasons and will be replaced by Hillary.

I go with this as the Number 3 debunking site. It has been run by David Emory for 10 years and often shows up more in Google searches than others.

This is my Number 4 site that often shows up in a Google search of such suggestions like we should boycott big oil companies to bring down gas prices.

My debunking method

Rather than go directly to one of the above web sites to debunk a message, I often find it faster to use Google (www.google.com) which provides hits that lead directly to the web page debunking the particular claim. That way you don't have go to the site and then search for the topic. I look for key words in a questionable message and then type them in the search block in Google, such as the name of the author, the title of the missive and any unique words. This almost always provides hits at debunking sites. It may take a few Google searches using different key words but it works. Good luck debunking. Please give it a try before forwarding stuff to me.