Blossom Know the Food You Eat

(CNN)At first sight, information technology looks like any other drool-inducing nutrient video that you can find on Facebook. Only this time, the viral video promises to help yous find out whether your nutrient is faux or real using "16 easy tests to effort at home."

But behind the slick product, the video hides a number of fake claims along with a serial of inaccuracies, half-truths, and conspiracy theories.

The video, produced by First Media-owned Bloom which posted information technology to the company's Facebook page, has gathered an astonishing 93 million views since June 1, along with more than 500,000 reactions, 170,000 comments and 3 million shares.

Facebook'southward fact-checking partners at Lead Stories have sent Blossom a detailed list of which claims were incorrect and why, a source at Lead Stories told CNN. The visitor is expected to right the video and it'southward working with Facebook on the best format, the source said. A spokesperson at First Media confirmed, "We appealed the ranking with Facebook and its third-party fact-checking agency. We are actively back and along with the fact checkers for an expeditious resolution."

In a divide argument to CNN, Kickoff Media said, "Blossom'southward research and production teams piece of work very hard to ensure high quality and visually entertaining content that intrigues the natural curiosity and critical thinking of our audience and supplies value and ideas. Many of the examples presented in the video are, indeed, disturbing. This video offers information from a variety of reputable and globally-recognized sources already available to the boilerplate consumer."

"The video does non claim that all products or specific manufacturers include these materials, nor does it brand whatever health or nutritional suggestions or recommendations," the argument continues, "They are demonstrations of things we consider to be important for our global audience, however this content is intended only for informational purposes and as entertainment."

Plastic rice and burned cheese

One of the claims, nearly food companies mixing rice with plastic, has been debunked several times since at to the lowest degree 2011, equally evidenced past this comprehensive circular-up by fact-checking platform Snopes. Another controversial claim is that "candy cheese with chemicals is difficult to melt," turning blackness when exposed to flame. A closer look at the "natural" cheese in the video shows it also contains black bits, equally often happens when something burns. The merits showtime emerged in 2014 and was debunked by Snopes in another article.

Even more than puzzling are the claims that "coffee with additives floats while pure coffee sinks" and "pure tea doesn't stain." Freshly-roasted java tends to bladder while stale coffee tends to sink, equally reported also by Snopes. And blackness tea contains tannins, which is probable to exit stains and marks on fabric, skin, china, and fifty-fifty teeth. Another claim is that "baby nutrient contains ground-upwards rocks advertised as fortified calcium."

FDA weighs in

In response to a request for annotate on the video, the U.s.a. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) issued a statement to CNN saying that such videos could erode the trust that consumers have in them.

FDA spokesman Peter Cassell told CNN: "Federal police requires that nutrient is safe and properly labeled. For example, all food additives and color additives must be canonical by FDA before marketplace entry, and the labeling of food must exist truthful and non misleading. We take food contagion and fraud very seriously and do take action when problems arise, peculiarly if information technology appears that the adulteration was intentional."

"Consumers should rest assured that most of the practices illustrated in this video are not legal in the U.S.," he connected, "and any FDA-regulated product that violates or appears to violate the Federal Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act may be subject field to seizure, mandatory think, or other enforcement action."

"Consumers should be able to trust that the foods they consume are safe and videos like these can undermine the confidence consumers have in the FDA'southward office in maintaining the prophylactic of our nutrient supply," he added.

After the initial Facebook posting, the video promptly spread on other social media platforms as well, including Twitter, where information technology had viii million views and 118,000 retweets and Instagram, where it stands at i.9 one thousand thousand views.

Facebook's fact-checking

In its fight against fake news, Facebook has partnered with fact-checking organizations to help establish whether content is authentic. So if you attempt to share the video, a popular-upwardly window tells you that there's "additional reporting on this," with links to two publications, Atomic number 82 Stories and Swedish-based Metro.se, both of which have debunked the video.

Lead Stories' Maarten Schenk, who has penned a detailed commodity exposing the video's bogus claims, told CNN he looked upward the video in their social media-tracking engines and saw that it was massively trending.

Schenk showed CNN that after his debunking was published on June three, the video's popularity prodigal somewhat.

"Our fact-check did accept an impact on the virality, you tin can clearly run into when we flagged it," he said. "It is still doing thousands of shares per 60 minutes simply at least information technology is non doing tens of thousands anymore."

One of the reasons why the video is even so sharing well on Facebook is that Lead Stories gave it a "Mixture" rating, not the heavier "False" rating, Schenk said.

"That would have slowed it down more than. But in that location are some truthful elements in the video so 'Mixture' is [fairer]," he said. "It is going wild on other platforms. They should besides piece of work with fact-checkers. We try to tag copies on other platforms in Facebook's organization likewise when we spot them so if people post those links to Facebook, they will also encounter the warning.

Starting time Media's defense

Blossom'due south owner, First Media, is a social-media publisher.

The company, which has more 50 million followers, says on its website information technology supplies "immature women with artistic, surprising and wow-worthy ideas to make their life more than inspired, productive and efficient."

In its statement to CNN, First Media said the experiments were conducted every bit shown in the video with existent products. Some of them were shipped from overseas, the company said.

The statement also includes a lengthy, ane-by-1 explanation of some of the claims in the video. However, the processed cheese merits links to a Vice commodity from 2015 that disputes the very idea of the "unnaturalness" of processed cheese cited in the Blossom video, proverb: "Basically, processed cheese is non some kind of Satanic abracadabra — in fact, it'due south pretty old-school science."

A Facebook spokesperson told CNN it did not accept information on this detail video only it referred to its policy for reducing the spread of imitation news, which includes removing the content that violates its standards, reducing the distribution of fabric, or informing people by giving them more context on the information they see in their news feed.

CNN has contacted Instagram and YouTube, and is awaiting comment.

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Source: https://www.cnn.com/2019/06/07/us/viral-video-facebook-plastic-rice-debunk-trnd/index.html