A lot of what you read on @UberFacts is factually incorrect
Flickr CC By: Nicolas Raymond
Shocker: Something you're reading on the internet might be wrong! According to Gizmodo writer Matt Novak, @UberFacts, a popular Twitter account that dispenses allegedly true information, isn't doing such a good job with that "facts" part. Novak took on the arduous task of fact-checking all 64 of @UberFacts' most recent facts, and discovered that many of them were stretching the truth or outright false.
"Looks like 38 of them were true, 11 were false and 15 were partially true or highly debatable — what I'm calling true-ish. We all make mistakes. But UberFacts really does seem to make more errors than your average fun fact account," he wrote. The most alarming incorrect "fact" he discovered was the claim that Jagermeister was originally concocted as a cough medicine. In reality, it was originally developed as digestif before drunk co-eds got their hands on it.
Click on over to Gizmodo to read the fact-check in full.
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Jordan Valinsky is the lead writer for Speed Reads. Before joining The Week, he wrote for New York Observer's tech blog, Betabeat, and tracked the intersection between popular culture and the internet for The Daily Dot. He graduated with a degree in online journalism from Ohio University.
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