Fact-checking

Additional reporting by Nicholas Krastel.

Fact Checker is Jacqueline Coletti.

Production assistance from Malachi Benitez and Emily Locke.

Sound design and mixing by Kyle Randall for Dovetail Sound.

We are your two-step verification on all the BS.

And whenever anyone on this show makes a claim that is misleading or an outright lie, our fact checker will hit the buzzer and you'll hear this sound on a statement like this.

That's the sound.

Meta, the parent company of Facebook, is supportive of political protesters.

For several hours, Meta suspended the main Instagram page of the No Kings organizers during the height of last weekend's protests.

Meta claims they suspended the account because of suspected bot activity.

Joining me today as our resident fact checker is Dr. Xavier Buck, who is the founder of History in Three, the executive director of the Dr. Huey P. Newton Foundation, and the founding director of the Black Panther Party Museum.

Welcome, my friend.

It's sensible if it, it, it also allows, um-

Can you check, Fact Checker, how long?

... for time.

For periods.

Yeah, just check there.

Just check there.

Check the Fact Checker.

So you say if it's, if it's after, like, five years, you don't, you don't want the cows back?

and just fact checking a range of features from them at the jump I started to notice how the reporters incorporated new scientific studies into the stories and really how little how little of the research itself that they covered but they did a great job of putting those pieces in context and so that was quite the learning curve for me because I think I was still approaching scientific discovery with a scientist lens, but needing to train myself to take a storyteller's perspective on how I wanted to cover them or not.

And what was that process like for you as you started to take on? So you said you started as a fact checker.

Once you started taking on reporting assignments, what did you learn along the way about how to tell a story in science?

Well, half the time I would pitch like these incremental studies and editors would tell me, no, that's not interesting.

And inside field reporting, every day I'm on the field, it's just the date, right? And then within every date, I have my audio file.

I take photos of all my handwritten pages from my Write in the Rain notebook.

And then I have another Word document in which I transcribe my handwritten notes into a searchable format for Fact Checker, right? I don't want anyone to try and read my messy scrawl.

And then... outside of Google Drive at the end of every day.

...

Nick W., and Daniel Salmon, AKA Bethany Fox, our amazing Discord community manager, Brian Piotrowski, Tom C., Eric Gonzalez, Jam the Ottoman, AKA Sirum11590, Zachary Herring, Eek7674, Omni Slick, Alex the Alley Cat, Justin Nispel, Riley, The Official NCR Fact Checker, Mr. Wally Phelps, Eld the Zombie, Yup Fed, AKA Knife, Raven, Mike Eveland, AxeBlade07, The Official NCR Beat Writer, RMS Jackson, Gus and Penny, Matthew Salmon.

[laughs]

And now, we introduce a man known not only in the gaming community, but all around the world.