Annie Lab newsroom is a fact-checking project at the Journalism and Media Studies Centre at the University of Hong Kong (HKU Journalism) in collaboration with ANNIE (Asian Network of News & Information Educators), a not-for-profit educational organization registered in Hong Kong (CR number 2890935).

Background

In recent years, a constant stream of fraudulent news stories has given rise to troubling cultural trends and alarming political movements across the world.

False claims, misleading factoids, exaggerations, propaganda, hoaxes, rumors, questionable advertising, radical extremism and other types of misinformation and disinformation are now being masqueraded and distributed as news.

In October 2019, the Journalism and Media Studies Centre at the University of Hong Kong (HKU Journalism) co-established a daily fact-checking newsroom in partnership with ANNIE (Asian Network of News & Information Educators), a not-for-profit organization focusing on news literacy education in Asia. …

By Fengjiaxin Li

On Oct 22, a photo showing four people in protective gear and handcuffs was posted on Facebook with a claim that the 12 Hong Kongers arrested in August by Chinese coast guards while fleeing to Taiwan are being taken to a Shenzhen court.

Within a day, the post gained over 2,000 likes and 340 comments. According to social media tracking tool CrowdTangle, the same claim has garnered 64,000 interactions on Facebook alone.

The same claim can also be found on Reddit, Twitter and LIHKG although the Reddit post has since been deleted.

The claim is false. The photo in question was not taken in Shenzhen, nor did it have anything to do with the case of the 12 Hong Kong youths still detained in Shenzhen. …

记者 Annie Lab团队

中国网民组成的网络群组帝吧（又名李毅吧）上周二在脸书群组发布了一段视频。视频中，一群蒙面劫匪突袭了美国德克萨斯州休斯顿一家枪支店，砸碎展示柜并偷走大量枪支。

帝吧的帖文称”这样的暴乱场景让人感到不安。休斯顿枪店被抢劫，杀戮在所难免”，暗指视频中的人和5月乔治·弗洛伊德之死引发的“黑命贵”抗议活动有关。但这种说法是错误的。

实际上、这段录像记录的休斯顿抢劫案在四年多前的2016年3月1日发生，被劫的是 Carter’s Country Guns & Ammo 枪店的一家分店。

2016年3月3日，也就是抢劫案发生的两天后，非营利组织 Crime Stoppers in Houston 公布了原始监控录像 (第一段、第二段)，后来欧洲跨国新闻电视台Euronews 将这些监控录像剪辑成短视频，而帝吧发布的视频则是从Euronews 的视频中截取的。

美国 NBC 新闻当时报道枪店被盗去50件武器。监控摄像头一共拍到了10名嫌疑人。一年后，据当地媒体报道，两名嫌疑人因持有被盗枪支而被定罪。

帝吧这段视频在两天内被观看了61600多次，视频下许多评论嘲笑美国的自由和民主，少数人则指出这段录像与当下时事无关。其他脸书用戶也分享了该视频。

帝吧是百度贴吧的一个论坛板块，据估计有超过2000万用户关注，并以参与或发起群体性的网络攻击事件而闻名，包括2016年在台湾总统当选人蔡英文的脸书页面中大量刷屏反台独信息。

声明：本文由学生撰写。香港大学新闻及传媒研究中心教职员已核查及编辑本文，尽可能确保其准确性。然而我们无法保证文章内容完全准确无误。如发现错误或对文章内容有任何疑问，请通过电子邮件与我们联系：contact@annieasia.org

Our project has been featured in the following reports

• “China: Truth in a Pandemic” | Al Jazeera (April 9, 2020)

• “Koksende Demonstranten, tote Vögel: Die Fake-News-Falle” | SRF Schweizer Radio und Fernsehen (January 22, 2020)
• “Social media tearing Hong Kong further apart” | NHK World (December 16, 2019)
• “How Fake News and Rumors Are Stoking Division in Hong Kong” | Bloomberg (November 12, 2019)

• “Hong Kong protests and ‘fake news’: in the psychological war for hearts and minds, disinformation becomes a weapon used by both sides” | South China Morning Post (October 14, 2019)

By Cheryl Ho, Nina Milhaud, and Chris Wong

“Alternative” theories abound

Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson Zhao Lijian suggested on Twitter in early March the coronavirus SARS-CoV-2, which causes COVID-19, originated in the United States.

The claim was based on an earlier article published by a known conspiracy website in Canada called Global Research that alleges there is “evidence” indicating the virus came from the U.S. (it has since been taken down).

On the same day, the Chinese Embassy in South Africa retweeted Zhao and China’s state-controlled media followed suit. …

By Annie Lab team

We have created a Flipboard magazine to share our bookmarks on fact-checking stories related to the 2020 U.S. presidential election.

If you have any content that seems to have not yet been investigated by any. fact checker, please contact us so that our team can look into it.

By Annie Lab team

A video circulating on Twitter shows a man stroking the back of a woman sitting next to him during what appears to be a conference in China.

It has been shared with a false claim that he is a delegate from the World Health Organization inappropriately touching a female attendee during a briefing session about the novel coronavirus outbreak in Wuhan.

The post in Japanese alleges the clip shows how “dirty” and “untrustworthy” WHO officials are. It has been viewed more than 245,000 times with about 9,000 shares and 14,000 likes.

Similar fictitious claims have been shared widely in Chinese. Another tweet in English shows the same video and claims it is an Australian politician instead of a WHO official. …

By Annie Lab Team

A map created and published by WorldPop Project at the University of Southampton in the UK on Feb. 5 has been widely used by news media around the world.

The map is often associated with a misleading claim that it shows hundreds of thousands of Wuhan residents (or even 5 million of them) traveling out of the city during the Lunar New Year holiday before the Chinese authority began sealing the borders on Jan. 23 and imposed a quarantine.

For example, The Sun wrote that the “horrifying” map depicts “the unstoppable spread of deadly coronavirus across the globe.” Australia’s news.com.au …