Fact checkers take up the fight against fake science on Facebook

In June, a video popped up on Facebook: Is your food fake or real? Find out with these 16 easy tests at home! The tests include heating up rice to look for bits of plastic mixed in with the real thing to ‘increase manufacturer profit’, and holding a slice of cheese over an open flame to check if it is ‘processed cheese with chemicals [that make it] difficult to melt’. Within a few hours, 6.5 million people had watched the video, and more than 3 million had shared it – a viral success. The only problem with this video: it was almost entirely bogus…