annie lab

@HKU School of Future Media

"FALSE" stamped on screenshots of Twitter and Instagram posts

False: Japan’s Abe did not oversee vaccine rollout or distribute ivermectin

18 July 2022

A widely shared conspiracy theory suggested Japan’s former prime minister was assassinated because he disobeyed the World Economic Forum. Annie Lab looked into three specific claims and found all of them unsubstantiated.

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Fact check Misleading

Misleading: Image sequence reversed to make watermelons appear stolen from Abe’s memorial

18 July 2022

Annie Lab reached out to a journalist who also took photos of the roadside memorial around the same time. The two slices of watermelon were placed later than the flowers on the ground.

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Fact check Misleading

Analysis: Viral social media posts about Dutch farmers’ protests

15 July 2022

Annie Lab investigated two images used in misleading social media posts about the ongoing farmers’ protests in the Netherlands.

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Fact check False

False: Images of ‘smiling’ newscasters announcing Shinzo Abe’s death are doctored

15 July 2022

Annie Lab obtained the videos of original broadcast and can confirm the two anchors were not smiling. The doctored images were created by a photo editing app for mobile devices called FaceApp.

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Fact check Misleading

Misleading: Video shows a rescue robot in Japan, not Communist Party’s ‘corpse picker’

14 July 2022

The Japanese rescue robot is called Robocue. The Tokyo Fire Department introduced it in 2009.

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Fact check Misleading

Misleading: Although CO2 facilitates plant growth, excessive amount could be harmful as well

13 July 2022

Experts say increased carbon dioxide impacts the natural ecosystem as a whole. The science of climate change has advanced since the 1920 experiment mentioned in the misleading tweet.

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