#fact check

Include the link to the source or it didn't happen!!!

And preferably include the source (website) name and date/year in the post too!!!

This has been a very loud, but very humble beseechment from your local media professional, thank you for your time

Seriously though, the spread of misinformation and disinformation is higher than ever, thanks to AI, botnets, 4chan, fascists, psyops, etc. Please use good sourcing!!! This is legit a way to help keep your communities safe.

If you see something and you don't know if it's true, or if the source is reliable, the two best/most comprehensive places to check are:

Snopes - to check if something is true/real, including social media posts and images/videos

Media Bias/Fact Check - to check if a website, news outlet, or other source is reliable. They rate outlets on accuracy of reporting and on political bias, and maintain detailed fact-checking records

I encourage you to check them whenever you're not sure about something important - the bigger and more upsetting it is, the more important it is to check! And I also encourage you to bookmark them for whenever are worried you might be reblogging something untrue or made by AI!

A lot of things portrayed or marketed as bows are actually something else. So how can we tell the difference?

time to correct misinformation - people have been crediting this photo of the moon to the artemis ii mission. that’s not true.

from what I can tell it originated from this post- photographed on August 10th 2025 and NOT from the artemis ii mission.

Someone pointed out that article's from 2023, and that's my mistake! Here is one that describes better where we are today.

So.

Downloads are still available as of time of writing. If you have music you want to keep, maybe go download it.

If your favorites sell music directly, go buy it there.

Do NOT go yell at musicians for being on Bandcamp. Where, one day after this broke, do you expect them to go? Where else can we get DRM-free files?

If the new owners keep Bandcamp Friday and DRM-free downloads, I will keep buying music from them.

Think of it this way: who are we trying to help? Musicians, right?

It won't help musicians to boycott Bandcamp and I have not (as of this writing) seen a call for it that's actually from a musician.

It really won't help musicians to yell at them about being on Bandcamp.

Next Bandcamp Friday I'm going to go buy albums I'd miss if they disappeared.

Hi folks. Let's play a fun game today called "unravelling bad science communication back to its source."

Journey with me.

Saw a comment going around on a tumblr thread that "sometimes the life expectancy of autism is cited in the 30s"

That number seemed..... strange. The commenter DID go on to say that that was "situational on people being awful and not… anything autism actually does", but you know what? Still a strange number. I feel compelled to fact check.

Quick Google "autism life expectancy" pulls up quite a few websites bandying around the number 39. Which is ~technically~ within the 30s, but already higher than the tumblr factoid would suggest. But, guess what. This number still sounds strange to me.

Most of the websites presenting this factoid present themselves as official autism resources and organizations (for parents, etc), and most of them vaguely wave towards "studies."

Ex: "Above And Beyond Therapy" has a whole article on "Does Autism Affect Life Expectancy" and states:

The link implies that it will take you to the "research studies" being referenced, but it in fact takes you to another random autism resource group called.... Songbird Care?

And on that website we find the factoid again:

Ooh, look. Now they've added the word "some". The average lifespan for SOME autistic people. Which the next group erased from the fact. The message shifts further.

And we have slightly more information about the study! (Which has also shifted from "studies" to a singular "study"). And we have another link!

Wonderfully, this link actually takes us to the actual peer-reviewed 2020 study being discussed. [x]

And here, just by reading the abstract, we find the most important information of all.

This study followed a cohort of adolescent and adult autistic people across a 20 year time period. Within that time period, 6.4% of the cohort died. Within that 6.4%, the average age of death was 39 years.

So this number is VERY MUCH not the average age of death for autistic people, or even the average age of death for the cohort of autistic people in that study. It is the average age of death IF you died young and within the 20 year period of the study (n=26), and also we don't even know the average starting age of participants without digging into earlier papers, except that it was 10 or older. (If you're curious, the researchers in the study suggested reduced self-sufficiency to be among the biggest risk factors for the early mortality group.)

But the number in the study has been removed from it's context, gradually modified and spread around the web, and modified some more, until it is pretty much a nonsense number that everyone is citing from everyone else.

There ARE two other numbers that pop up semi-frequently:

One cites the life expectancy at 58. I will leave finding the context for that number as an exercise for the audience, since none of the places I saw it gave a direct citation for where they were getting it.

And then, probably the best and most relevant number floating around out there (and the least frequently cited) draws from a 2023 study of over 17,000 UK people with an autism diagnosis, across 30 years. [x] This study estimated life expectancies between 70 and 77 years, varying with sex and presence/absence of a learning disability. (As compared to the UK 80-83 average for the population as a whole.)

This is a set of numbers that makes way more sense and is backed by way better data, but isn't quite as snappy a soundbite to pass around the internet. I'm gonna pass it around anyway, because I feel bad about how many scared internet people I stumbled across while doing this search.

People on quora like "I'm autistic, can I live past 38"-- honey, YES. omg.

---

tl;dr, when someone gives you a number out of context, consider that the context is probably important

this is a picture of a stack of bricks. it’s located at a construction site in new jersey.

if you do a reverse image search, you will find this image currently being posted on multiple social media networks along with the claim that violent protests in LA were planned by some nefarious conspiracy and that these pallets of bricks were dropped off at strategic locations near protests in order to fuel said violence.

often, when a picture like this is posted, the conversation is immediately flooded with commentators who readily accept the image as hard proof of what is “really happening” even though it is simply a photo of some bricks with no stated location or context (as for how i know the bricks are in NJ, see here: https://leadstories.com/hoax-alert/2025/06/fact-check-photo-of-bricks-was-not-taken-in-los-angeles-during-june-2025-protests.html)

there’s no AI trickery here, these are real bricks, and the people sharing the image don’t have to do any work to “prove” that these bricks have anything to do with the protest, because a pre-existing crowd of accounts is already there to support the narrative and shout down contradictions.

this is of course just a drop in the bucket. the misinformation war is huge, and pales in comparison to the physical violence that victims of ICE and other state forces are going through today, but all of these elements work together.

i am hearing from people in other parts of the country that LA is “on fire” (it isn’t), that local authorities have told law enforcement to stand down and join the protests (they haven’t), that there is widespread looting and rioting (there isn’t). there is zero justification for the national guard or marines being sent here, that is entirely a political stunt; albeit a disgusting and dangerous one. i have also seen people sharing videos of soccer fans and claiming they are protestors, sharing pics from other protests in 2020 or even in other countries, and claiming that its current footage of LA