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COM 301 Buzzsumo Assignment

Gisele Fetterman double-downs on charges that Mehmet Oz was cruel to puppies in medical research

In an exclusive interview with KDKA-TV, Gisele Fetterman double-downed on the charge.

We all know the wonderful joy of election time. Candidates sling the most outrageous stories out there and we eat them up. Are all those stories factual though? My most recent adventure in fact-checking brought me to a story about Dr. Oz who is in a heated race against John Fetterman for US senate. The article accuses Dr. Oz of killing puppies and other animals for medical research.

Dr. Oz’s Scientific Experiments Killed Over 300 Dogs, Entire Litter of Puppies

Columbia's internal investigation found that Oz's research team inflicted extensive suffering on canine test subjects in violation of the An

My search began on Buzzsumo.com using the words, "Oz puppies research". Many articles popped up accusing the famed surgeon and TV show host of his involvement in the slaughter of puppies as well as other animals. It seems this isn't really a new story, as the scandal was first exposed in 2004. Columbia University, where the research was conducted, was ordered to pay a $2,000 fine for violating the Animal Welfare Act. Later that year, they defended Dr. Oz as a top-notch researcher and doctor.

Mehmet Oz is facing accusations of animal abuse tied to his medical research. Here’s what you need to know.

Questions over treatment of animals in research that Oz oversaw at Columbia date back to the early 2000s. But there's no evidence that the S

Fact Check: Was Dr. Oz Responsible for Cruelly Experimenting on Puppies?

Allegations have circulated implicating Oz in the cruel treatment of animals at Columbia University. PEOPLE talked to a former Columbia empl

I continued my fact-checking journey by searching popular websites including factcheck.org and politifact.org, neither of these sites had any information on the Dr. Oz controversy. I took my search to Google.com and found articles in the Philadelphia Inquirer and a "fact check" article posted on people.com. Both articles concur, that while Dr. Oz was a principal investigator in the research studies, he wasn't directly involved in the abuse or murder of the animals. The article also mentions that Dr. Oz wasn't even mentioned in the case filed against Columbia University in 2004.

So is Dr. Oz a puppy killer as the Fetterman campaign would like you to believe? No, he isn't, but he did have some involvement and perhaps should've been in closer contact during the research studies that were conducted so that the animals hadn't been abused and treated inhumanely. Yet again I've learned how important it is to fact-check before believing any viral stories that I read on the internet.

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Assignment #3: Read Laterally

The pandemic seems to be waning, right? Guidelines from the CDC have been getting less and less restrictive. The WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus was recently quoted as saying that the COVID pandemic is nearing the end. So when I saw the retweet posted above by @PhdEdgar, I wondered if he knew something that the CDC and WHO wasn't sharing with the public. Who is @PhdEdgar and is he really a doctor?

https://twitter.com/PhdEdgar/with_replies

After scrolling through @PhdEdgar's twitter feed, I saw quite a bit of information posted by him in relation to COVID. I decided to further investigate to see what kind of credentials this "PhD" has.

Edgar Rivera Colón, Ph.D.

A simple google search pulled up information that verifies that yes, @PhdEdgar is in fact a PhD. His name, which he also lists on his Twitter feed, is Edgar Rivera Colon, he is a PhD of medical anthropology and lectures at Columbia SPS.

Edgar Rivera Colon | Keck School of Medicine of USC

As I continued my search, I found that he is also a clinical professor of Medical Education at Keck School of Medicine. I decided to do another google search on his name along with the People's CDC to see what results I may find.

The CDC is beholden to corporations and lost our trust. We need to start our own | The People's CDC

We’re epidemiologists, nurses and physicians, artists and biologists. We have come together with a common anger at the US government’s handl

An Op-Ed from The Guardian, which scores a 45 on the Interactive Media Bias Chart, reveals that Dr. Rivera is a member of the organization. There wasn't much information on People's CDC when I did a search with the syntax -site: I also searched for them on WHOIS and found that their domain information is private. After my adventures in reading laterally on Dr. Rivera, even though he is a PhD, I've decided to put my trust and faith in the recommendations given by the CDC and the WHO. Although Edgar Colon Rivera is a PhD, the CDC and the WHO have a lot more validity with the team of experts that they utilize.

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Assignment #2 Go Upstream

While searching for photos that might be doctored or possibly too bizarre to be true, I came across a photo on Twitter of a young Syrian boy sleeping next to his parents' graves. Immediately my heart sank, "How sad is this?", I thought to myself. This has to be real, right? What evil person would put something like this out there if it weren't true?

I did a little digging. First I did a google image search. I added the words, "Syria boy sleeps parents grave" to the search bar. Well that was enough to pull up quite a few articles in relation to this photo.

#SayNoToWar: Social media’s march for peace

Indian and Paksitani Twitter users unite with hashtag #SayNoToWar

First, I clicked on the above link, posted on the site: "Gulfnews.com" The article talks about how Twitter users have been using this photo along with the hashtag #saynotowar to take a stand against the conflict in the middle east. Seems like this really had some credibility, but I continued to click on a few more sites, which all came to the same conclusion: FAKE!

'Heartbreaking' Syria orphan photo wasn't taken in Syria and not of

Photographer shocked at how photo was 'twisted'

The real story behind the photo doesn't even have anything to do with Syria. It was taken in Saudi Arabia by amateur photographer, Abdelaziz, who used his nephew for the shoot. He had posted it on Instagram, using it to portray a fictional scene. It was then taken by others on social media, and used for a whole different agenda.

The real story behind “the Picture that made the whole world cry”

El Jadida, Morocco- A picture of a boy lying asleep between his parents’ graves has gone viral on

Just a few minutes of investigating is all I needed to find out if this photo was real or fiction. Not only was I able to find out that the picture was a fake, but I was also able to trace it back to the photographer, as well as the backstory behind the real reason the photo was taken.

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COM-301 Assignment #1 Fact Check

Joe Biden Files Paperwork for Reelection

It's official. Joe Biden will be running for reelection in 2024.

On my Twitter feed, there were multiple postings regarding Biden filing with for reelection: https://twitter.com/TheeKHiveQueenB/status/1564849659470057472 Curious, I clicked on one of the links and it brought me to a site called, "LIVE!" sanangelolive.com

In my quest to fact check this article, I searched on FactCheck.org with the words, "Biden files reelection" https://www.factcheck.org/2022/09/biden-hasnt-officially-filed-for-reelection-contrary-to-social-media-claims/ Immediately I found that this had been fact checked and was disproven by the organization. This was an interesting assignment and I plan to use this strategy in the future to check facts in articles, especially ones that are found through social media. Anyone can post anything and make it look official, but you can't always believe what you read on the internet. Even though this is something that we all know, it's easy to mistake "fake news" for truth.