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Facebook fake content: This video on Facebook has 6.5 million views and 110,000 likes in 7 hours. 30 thousand people are watching it right now. It is totally fake. 1/ 
The video is from a channel called Blossom. Blossom is a verified Facebook channel with 51 MILLION followers .
Here's the video "Is your food fake or real? Find out with these 16 easy tests at home!" Best I can tell, 15 of these are outright lies or hoaxes. One *might* be legit. facebook.com/watch/?v=43163…
The video claims rice is "mixed with plastic bits to increase manufacturer profit" and recommends trying to melt your rice to test it. This is a well-known hoax claim. Honestly, you'd notice if your rice was mixed with plastic! 4/
It claims some baby foods have "ground up rocks" in them, to add calcium, that can be found with a magnet. Of course, it's IRON that is attracted by magnets. Some foods do contain iron. That's a good thing (eg scientificamerican.com/article/get-th…)
This one's fun: Supposedly, some ice cream "contains washing powder for shine and lightness". Only by squeezing lemon juice on it can we be sure our ice-cream is free of washing powder. Right. Sure.
It says to add seaweed to milk in case it has 'rice water' in it. If so, it turns blue. Why? What sort of seaweed? Is rice-contaminated milk even a real thing?
Freshly-roast, freshly-ground coffee floats. Old coffee sinks. But this video claims that coffee that floats has "additives" and is "bad".
Salt water turns cloudy for a few reasons, eg as salt dissolves, it can displace the calcium out of hard water. It's not "fake salt that contains chalk". I mean, really. Fake salt. With chalk.
Supposedly, only pure spices ignite and fake spices don't. Really, damp spices don't ignite and "fake spices" probably contain stuff like sawdust, which totally burns.
This claims "pure tea" doesn't stain filter paper. But of course it would if it contained tannin like black teas often do. In this one, if you zoom in on the "impure tea" it looks like they added some mud to it to guarantee a nice clear stain.
This one says if you add sugar to melted butter that's adulterated with other oils, it will turn pink. Any oils? Why pink? How?
This isn't fake slurring Pelosi, Russian troll farms or anti-vaxxers. But it's massively-popular, has high production values, millions of viewers. And it's fake.
Blossom, the page that made and promotes this video, is owned by First Media. It claims that Blossom had the top branded video on Facebook last year.
Blossom/First Media is an advertising platform. Past customers listed on their website include @BedBathBeyond and @Tinder, who pay to have their content and messages in Blossom videos.
@BedBathBeyond @Tinder Oh, they're also on Instagram! The same video has 1.5 million views on Instagram in the 7 hours since it was uploaded.
@BedBathBeyond @Tinder Blossom's video tells you things you never knew about the food you eat. OK, you never knew them because they're lies. But they're interesting lies, presented credibly.
@BedBathBeyond @Tinder Blossom creates and publishes fake videos that are clearly designed to be widely watched and shared. Millions of people share them, thinking they're helping and informing their friends.
@BedBathBeyond @Tinder Using these lies, Blossom has built a Facebook page with 51 million subscribers which it can then monetize by selling services to advertisers.
@BedBathBeyond @Tinder If Facebook is serious about fighting fake content, it wouldn't let verified pages pump out fake videos to build a subscriber base to sell to advertisers.
@BedBathBeyond @Tinder But wait! There's more. Remember that video that they claimed was 2018's most popular on Facebook?
It's probably "10 tricks you didn't know you could do with your food!"
It's probably "10 tricks you didn't know you could do with your food!"
@BedBathBeyond @Tinder That video went up in October. 3 million reactions, 6.5 million shares, almost HALF A BILLION views. It's also fake. You might even vaguely remember seeing it. More here:
@BedBathBeyond @Tinder Note that yesterday's video is now up to 39 million views, 1.65 million shares and quarter of a million reactions. Millions of people are watching and believing this stuff.
One more thing: The lies get turned into "zombie facts" by articles like this one, written by content farms leaching off the viral popularity of these videos. en.businesstimes.cn/articles/11309…
One random person shared the vid to Twitter (from Instagram). It got 100k Retweets and 200k likes. Doubtless many other people got similar numbers when they shared it too.
A nice rebuttal of some of the claims in the video, including a few I left out, by @leadstoriescom here: hoax-alert.leadstories.com/3470557-fake-n…
Cool, some progress on this: Facebook's turned on its misleading-content warning for the video.
