- For this brake the fake assignment I chose to look deeper into a tweet claiming the existence of a so called ‘Norwegian Blue owl’. I found this tweet on a twitter account that posts one photo of an owl every day. On December second, this account posted a photo of the alleged ‘Norwegian Blue owl’. I was questioning whether or not this owl was real because I had never heard of nor seen anything like it before. This post had 150.6k likes, 14.9k retweets and 1,884 quote tweets. Here are the fact checking tools I used to determine whether it is real of fake.
2. The source of this tweet was Daily Owls. It had no blue checkmark beside it’s name meaning we can not take the information it provides for granted. The comments on the post were very controversial. Some suggested it was fake while others were admiring it’s beauty. There was nothing to confirm if it was real or fake.
3. To verify the source, I looked up their name on Google. The only results that appeared were links to their own twitter page. There were no other information about this source from other websites. When I searched for the daily owl on Wikipedia, their were once again no results. This tells us that they are not a well know source and that they are not experts or a form of authority on the subject. This means we can’t say for sure that everything they post and tweet is true. However, just because they are not well known, doesn’t mean that all of their tweets are fake either. This is where snopes.com comes in handy.
4. My next step was to do a search for the ‘Norwegian blue owl on snopes.com, an easy to use, fact checking, website. Snopes told me that despite the beauty of the owl in the picture, there was just no such thing as a ‘Norwegian blue owl’ and that the picture was most likely AI generated.
5. My last and final step was to check other reliable sources on the subject to the ‘Norwegian blue owl’. Like Britannica.com says, “owls vary in color from white through many shades of tan, gray, brown, or rufous (reddish) to deep brown” but none are blue. In conclusion this tweet was FALSE.
