/r/DebunkThis
We are an evidence-based subreddit dedicated to taking an objective look at questionable theories, dodgy news sources, bold-faced claims, and suspicious studies.
1- New posts requesting a debunk must use "Debunk This:" as a prefix in the title. Use "Meta:" for meta posts about the subreddit or debunking in general.
2- Put the idea you wish other users to debunk in the title, such as "Debunk This: American Spirits are healthier due to their use of organic tobacco".
3- All posts must include a link to a source.
4- Posts must also include a specific claim so commenters know exactly what to investigate. For example:
"According to this YouTube video, dihydrogen monoxide turns amphibians homosexual. Is this true? Also, did Albert Einstein really claim this?"
5- Political memes, long lists of separate claims, crossposts to other subreddits, and sources less than two months old, are liable to be removed.
6- All posters and commenters must remain civil, refrain from abusive language and personal attacks.
7- Posters and commenters must act in good faith. Posts that are deemed as trolling will be removed and repeat offenders may be banned.
8- No NSFW/NSFL images in posts or comments. Descriptions are fine.
By default, all new links are flaired as "Not Yet Debunked". The OP can change this once they feel satisfied that their submission has been either debunked, proven to be true, or shown to be misleading or lacking in evidence.
r/BadScience
r/Skeptic
r/Rational_Skeptic
r/DisinformationWatch
• Reuters Fact Check Page - Regularly updated news fact check
• Media Bias / Fact Check - Great resource for current news fact checking + checking a source's political bias
• Science Based Medicine - A scientific look at current issues and controversies
• Deplatform Disease - A medical blog that specifically counters anti-COVID-vaccine claims
• Respectful Insolence - David Gorsky's blog on antivax shenanigans, politics, and psuedoscience
• 157 papers that DO NOT prove vaccines cause autism - for those antivax claims
• 20 cognitive biases that screw up our decisions [Infographic]
• 5 Characteristics of Scientific Denialism - How to spot fake skepticism, as well as fake science
• Common examples of misleading graphs - How to spot dodgy infographics
• Metabunk.org - a message board dedicated to debunking popular conspiracies
/r/DebunkThis
Hey guys, i saw on my TikTok and Youtube about The Economist cover with the title ''the world ahead 2025'' which they claim that there is a lot of subliminal messages and symbolism that i will explain everything here below:
For those who don't know, The Economist is a cover that talks about global geopolitical and economic trends, and it is like a calendar of pre-programmed events, it's no wonder that the Rothschilds own this magazine
In the image at the top, there is the planet Saturn, which represents a kind of Lord of the Rings and the chaos that will govern all these terrible events, Saturn is also Cronos, which represents time and the scythe that blinds its time, the hourglass represents the infinity symbol which is identical to the number 8, the number of the Ouroboros snake, is the conclusion and the hour of the blind, if they say that 2024 was the year 8, then 2025 will be the year 9, the hermit represents lucifer, the bearer of light that represents the descent into the underworld, which means that darkness will settle over the cities, which is the image just below which represents a city in rubble, possibly destroyed by atomic bombs, epidemics, or other type of mass destruction
Numerous religious leaders are wearing a ring with a black stone that serves to invoke the protection and power of the darkness of Saturn, the God of the black cube/matrix, if we add up all the small squares of the cube horizontally, they will all give 15, and adding each of them together (5+1 to be exact) will give 666, the famous number of the beast. Although we are in the age of Pluto, where in Greek mythology represents Hades, the God of the underworld, Saturn will still have a strong influence
Other images also indicate a possible new pandemic coming from Africa, Asia, Europe or part of Oceania because on the side there is an image of a vaccination syringe, which they say will probably happen in March, a possible conflict involving the United States and Europe against Russia and China, culminating in the Third World War the end of the sovereignty of the Dollar, a possible economic crisis in Japan with an image of yen and an arrow pointing downwards, the end of democracy and the beginning of the global socialist dictatorship of the antichrist, which the latter is being secretly represented by a mouth, nose and an eye, which alludes to book of revelations' antichrist
Sorry for the prophetic and scary tone of the post, I saw the cover and it left me quite worried, I wanted to know what your opinion is, is it fake??? Should we be worried???
Looking at the chart, you can see a rise in the average rate for medically necessary abortions after Dobbs and the Human Life Protection Act (kind of suspicious, a misleading conclusion at least), but I'm curious about the deflection of the deaths of Neveah Crain and Josseli Barnica onto individual doctors rather than the law stating that doctors could get prosecuted for abortion. Especially since "reasonable medical judgement" can be poked in by any prosecutor.
This notion has been making the rounds in far right circles for a while.
I work in oncology and haven’t observed a clear correlation—it often seems quite “random”. I would love to see more research focused on the genetic factors that influence diseases, rather than solely on the effects of diet, exercise, and lifestyle. For instance, a person with a poor diet may never experience a heart attack or heart disease, while someone who is fit and follows a healthy diet could still suffer from a heart attack or heart disease, likely due to genetic predisposition.
Gene therapy has the potential to revolutionize how we treat diseases in the future, though it’s not widely discussed or understood yet. Society tends to focus on external factors, such as diet and lifestyle, to prevent or avoid disease, but I believe this perspective may not be entirely accurate. Understanding one’s genetic risks is far more critical than simply focusing on things like going to the gym and eating a salad. Our bodies are capable of adapting to various exposures, and genetic factors often play a more significant role in disease development.
I can't help but think number 8 on this sounds like satire. Have I bit the onion? Surely it's not meant literally.
Can someone verify the validity of this? Was there some sort of site defacement?
This comes from a tweet by Wide Awake Media. Let me be clear, I don’t believe this at all. My brother sent the link and I think my whole family is going to believe this BS. I looked around for any information outside of this tweet where Fauci’s lawyers supposedly said this. I look for any source saying that vaccines mandated for children have never been safety tested. Because there’s no way that’s true. Does anyone know of some good sources to debunk this? I’ll keep looking myself. I want to find some source that I can send to my family to debunk this nonsense.
Here’s the tweet:
Having been called a liar by Anthony Fauci for saying that "not one of the 72 vaccines mandated for children has ever been safety tested", RFK Jr. sued Fauci.
After a year of stonewalling, Fauci's lawyers admitted that RFK Jr. had been right all along.
"There's no downstream liability, there's no front-end safety testing... and there's no marketing and advertising costs, because the federal government is ordering 78 million school kids to take that vaccine every year."
"What better product could you have? And so there was a gold rush to add all these new vaccines to the schedule... because if you get onto that schedule, it's a billion dollars a year for your company."
"So we got all of these new vaccines, 72 shots, 16 vaccines... And that year, 1989, we saw an explosion in chronic disease in American children... ADHD, sleep disorders, language delays, ASD, autism, Tourette's syndrome, ticks, narcolepsy."
"Autism went from one in 10,000 in my generation... to one in every 34 kids today."
https://aaplog.org/fact-checking-the-fact-checkers-abortionists-misrepresent-the-facts/
I mean the bottom 2 paragraphs, since the first is special pleading about how performing an abortion is fine if you didn't intend to terminate the fetus from the "consent to sex is consent to pregnancy" crowd.
What are responses to the notion that specific complications are rare and go away, and that abortion would somehow be more dangerous? At best I can only come up with the alternative explanation of Pro-Choice doctors being fanatical fetus rippers, which sounds like a ludicrous strawman coming from the people trying to deny that they perform abortions, but nothing distinctly medical.
So there is an iceberg video (or at least it appears to be) that attempts to argue against anti-gun/gun control arguments. Here are a few examples of what he tackles
-Assault weapon being a scaremongering term since most legal weapons are semi auto
-Stating that banning guns or restricting them goes against the constitution and the fact that its been used over more than a century makes it unnecessary
-That ar-15 and other similar weapons do not ruin the meat when hunting
-that criminals who use guns obtain them illegally anyway therefore restricting or making certain guns illegal makes no sense
Hey y'all Got a question I got some concerns about project 2025 Especially the labor laws that allow companies and then some to discriminate against people who have disabilities including people who are on the spectrum
Can anybody please debunk this and other concerns
I remember that some of instagram reels and social media says that time since 2020 is more quickly than the last years before, some of conspiracy pseudosciencists claim is that because Schumann Resonance is out of control, reaching far more than 1900 UTI and more than 432 hz than a day (I don't know if that's the record, correct me if I'm wrong), with some with abnormal peaks being recorded during the September 11 attacks and the earthquake that hit northeast Japan in 2011, however, for some strange reason, since 2023 it has been out of control, breaking records after records, there's also a cathedral in Chartres, France that has an circle incredibly identical to this thing, there are claims that NASA use this resonance powered motors in their aircrafts
For those who don't know, the Schumann Resonance is a cavity between the ionosphere and the surface in which electromagnetic waves at a certain frequency predominate and vary over time, in other words, they are the Earth's heartbeat
Some of pseudoscientific conspiracists claim that this is making people get their neurons damaged due to excess brain waves and making people get imnsonia, making m5+ earthquakes getting more frequently, and more frequently climatic disasters, some of them makes claim this is because the earth is in a process of magnetically shifting that begun in 2019 and will conclude in 2039 that will catastrophically harm the planet, the same happened when dinosaurs went extinct according to this claim, Lisa Miller's The Awakened Brain'' also explains that
Thoughts??? Is this thing that claim about schumann resonance fake???
The Laurel County clerk’s office pulled a voting machine from public use Thursday, the first day of early voting in Kentucky, after someone posted a video on TikTok claiming their intended presidential vote for Republican Donald Trump instead was credited to Democrat Kamala Harris. Laurel County Clerk Tony Brown, a Republican, said in an interview Thursday that his staff couldn’t recreate the issue, but that it pulled the machine aside for examination as soon as it got word of the complaint. “We went right there to it. But we couldn’t make it do what she said it did to her. We couldn’t recreate it,” Brown said. “We were pushing all the buttons, and it was fine.”
https://www.kentucky.com/news/politics-government/article294842374.html
My initial thoughts: It's likely a calibration drift issue. Touchscreens, even the ones on voting machines are not immune to this type of drift. It's also possible that the drift can go the other direction, so pressing kamala would have selected Trump. If this happens to you, you can press other names and the offset should affect them too.
Also, I don't expect any Trump supporter would have this happen to them, and just shrug it off like "oh well I guess I'm voting Kamala." They would make it known, like what happened here and the machine would be taken offline. The risk/reward is not worth it for someone to try to throw the election like this, because if all the machines are offline, how are they going to force people to vote for Kamala? Is the plan supposed to be that only red county machines are affected? Same thing, people are going to report it to authorities and it's going to be all over the news.
So this idea that the machines were intentionally rigged to vote Kamala seems to be a misunderstanding. No Trump supporter is going to let the machine submit their ballot with Kamala selected, just as no Kamala voter would let their machine submit with Trump.
Also from that article
“The official who worked with (the woman who posted the TikTok video) said, ‘Did you vote for Trump?’, and she said, ‘Yeah, it’s on my card.’ Of course, she didn’t say anything until she was done. Which doesn’t help.”
I think this raises the question as to whether the woman knew it was just a calibration error and after recording the video, worked around it to vote for her intended choice, before raising alarm and blowing this up like the machine did it intentionally.
Thoughts?
I came across a comment with this text that I know is wrong:
Climate change huh?
You think banks are giving 30 year loans to people a million people in coastal cities ( or entire states ) if there was actual and proven scientific data that states those properties will be under water any time soon ( or ever ) ?I think not. The doomsday dates of 'climate catastrophe' have come and gone a few times. Yet, here we are. Are there differences in the Earth's climate? Surely. Has it ALWAYS been an evolving climate? 100%.Remember kids. There was an ice age... and that happened naturally... without human influence.So yea, if you want to run around being scared of the 'climate change' - that sounds like your problem. By an EV... get a tax break. That should help the situation... don't fossil fuels to creat electricity to charge it... oh wait, you do.
I know that this is not true, but I need help with a response to debunk it.
For the record i don't believe it but my dad made the claim
He claims that trump showed the leader of isis a photo of his house as a threat and then there was no more Americans killed by isis during his term
Not my comment I just found it
National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER, 2011) found that increased competition from low-skilled immigrants led to significant wage suppression in the construction, service, and agricultural industries. These industries typically employ a high percentage of immigrant workers, and the influx has led to wage compression for native workers.
Vandenbussche (2018) documented that sectors experiencing high rates of illegal immigration saw greater declines in wages. By analyzing labor market outcomes, it became evident that the presence of undocumented workers intensified competition for low-wage jobs, leading to a disproportionate impact on natives employed in similar capacities.
Autor, Dorn, and Hanson (2016) highlights that increased immigration corresponds with rising income inequality, particularly affecting those at the lower end of the wage distribution. By flooding low-skilled job markets, immigrants disproportionately impact wages for workers who lack advanced skills, contributing to growing disparity
According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the broader measure of unemployment (U-6) includes a significant number of individuals who are discouraged from seeking work, resulting in underreported unemployment figures. Deporting illegals would give them jobs to atleast have a footing
Deporting illegals won't impact the wages of the workers but it could give opportunities to people who are unemployed
Tariffs create job security, encourages investment since investors sense that they are protected from foreign competition, can reduce labor exploitation, domestic industries that are protected from foreign competition would increase wages for workers
And its claim that project 2025 isn't radical agenda
So, my brother who is deep into conspiracy theory stuff has sent me a video (in German though) where all sorts of "evidence" is brought up that Pompeii was actually destroyed in 1631, not 79AD.
The evidence of this among others is that many medieval maps still show Pompeii, that a system of medieval canals was built through the city in 1591 by Domenico Fontana even with wells being connected to houses, that multiple books of the 1631 vesuvian eruption talk about Pompeii only being destroyed at that time etc
This site seems to list a bunch of those theories: https://stolenhistory.org/articles/79-a-d-no-more-pompeii-got-buried-in-1631.95/
Now, it obviously does not line up with what we know and also the architecture and art clearly aren't contemporary to the era that those books were written in, the fruit is a pinenut not pineapple, etc
. However, there are still some questions open that are rather difficult to research for me, namely the Domenico Fontana canals as described in that link and the books as described here: https://stolenhistory.net/threads/pompeii-was-destroyed-by-vesuvius-in-1631-petrenko.1745/
The first book is the oddest, as it supposedly in an eyewitness account by the author who saw Pompeii being destroyed in 1631.
Now, this is definitely not remotely enough evidence to rewrite our understanding of Pompeii, but I would like to be able to debunk the two last big points that I could not manage to address in depth yet.
Does anyone here have the expertise of the topic to help?
Videos
https://youtu.be/3l7bcb3aoGc?si=CE9xCTAIJlWjPd6D Video of breakdown of james case
https://youtu.be/0Aoew3jKMb4?si=7LChRGiDh8a9TZm_ Video interview (4:35 description of case)
Birthmark cases
James's case journal format
I have spent a good amount of time looking through the children who remember past lives cases at the DOPS at UVA. I have seen a lot of evidence and I don't think that the usual responses "Its all anecdotal" " "Kids have wild Imaginations." "Parents are lying for attention" "The Parents were asking leading questions"...
I have not seen any good arguments to refute the claim that Reincarnation is real. They have over 2500 cases more then half of which the previous personality has been identified based of statements from the child.
Additional info on methodology they use
https://med.virginia.edu/perceptual-studies/wp-content/uploads/sites/360/2024/09/Moraes2024_Children-who-claim-previous-life-memories_A-case-report-and-literature-review.pdf
First of all, i wanted to make it very clear what everyone should already know that this project actually happened, but many conspiracy theorists believe that this project is still ongoing, causing new victims every year
I will first explain what the project is about and then move on to the allegations
Project MK Ultra was a secret CIA (US Central Intelligence Agency) program, active in the 1950s and 1960s, with the aim of investigating mind control methods and behavior modification techniques. The project involved experiments on human beings, often without the consent of the participants. The program gained notoriety due to its unethical and cruel practices, such as the use of psychotropic drugs, gangstalking, v2k, hypnosis, sensory deprivation and brainwashing techniques. MK Ultra was officially closed in 1973, but many documents were destroyed, fueling more rumor than truth
Facts about MK Ultra:
Conspiracy claims:
There are various other claims I won't be able to mention everything, such as the book Tranceformation of America, Lens contact tech, etc.
Any thoughts??? What is fake and what is truth in this story???
The (supposed) evidence acan be found here.
I was sent this https://www.facebook.com/share/r/1CrGXeEdA5/?mibextid=UalRPS video/reel that allegedly predicts that the speed of light was predicted by the Quran. In my mind it’s untrue, but I’m finding it difficult to disprove it as the video is so jumbled. I was wondering if any of you guys could?
So far I think that the “heliocentric gravity of the moon” means nothing and that they’re being cheeky by using this non-existent constant to multiply with the speed of the moon.
Note: I am a Muslim actually, but I don’t believe in this nonsense.
Video On Tiktok of a Rocket Shower Somewhere
Hi guys! Was on Tiktok and saw this video. It’s really shaky footage of someone in a car driving down the street while the sky is red with smoke and fire and maybe a hundred “flares” (or maybe rockets?) lighting up the night sky with a woman desperately sobbing in the background. Commenters are saying it is Infinity Castle (a kind of online game). Idk anything about Infinity Castle but it seems the posting of this video coincides with the recent war and some parts of the comment section are being really hateful.
Question:
A. Is this real war footage or B. just another AI-generated video that’s just really badly posed because of the time/political landscape it was posted or C. some kind of actual celebration and it’s just fireworks?
Notes:
Thanks for the help! (I hope it’s letter C)
Praying this is just another “clout-chasing” account trying to cam-whore a video
Link to Tiktok video:
https://vt.tiktok.com/ZS2cH4Ayg/
P.S. it already has 128M views 🫨😵💫
federal funding to plant parenthood actually increased under the Trump administration via Medicaid reimbursements despite using title X program it didn't disrupt monetary supply stream to planned parenthood and about the global gag rule there are evidence suggesting that restricting funding to organizations that provide comprehensive family planning services can lead to higher rates of unintended pregnancies and unsafe abortions, as these services often include crucial preventive care that reduces the incidence of abortion and UNFPA does not promote or fund abortions
Not my comment to clarify
Guys, what is the Bohemian Grove??? And what supposedly happens here??? Is that because when i saw this location for the first time when i used to surf on conspiracy theories i became shocked for the first time when i saw the conspiracy version
First of all, coincidentally all the people who visited this camp is people who conspiracy believers hates the most: Bill Gates, George Soros, The Rockefellers, Rothschild, liberal politicians such as Obama, The Clintons, George Bush, Joe Biden and hollywood actors such as Madonna and Will Smith, also there's a huge owl statue called Cremation of Care, where members worship this statue where members worship this statue, And there are various allegations from people who visited the site and reported its alleged atrocities
Alex Jones, a while ago, "infiltrated" the place disguised as a club security guard to film the supposed ritual where he claimed that humans were being sacrificed, so much so that he picked up a pamphlet when was to leave the place and saw a drawing of Moloch on that pamphlet, a canaanite demon that devours children and teenagers alive
The most famous of them that even made news in the media, the case of Ryan Garcia, he claimed on his Twitter that they tied him to a tree where they forced him to watch teenagers and minors being tortured to death, he also secretly heard conversations saying that Elon Musk will replace 93% of humanity with robots, secret files of the Ark of the Covenant and Jesus and dimensional beings arriving on Earth through portals transforming into aliens after the rapture takes place
Is that these claims fake??? What is the story of this group???
People like suspicious Observers from YouTube or Chan Thomas the writer have said that there will be a pole shift which will cause massive tsunamis and earthquakes. According to them this is cyclical and will happen again soon
As with many other users that have done this topic, I will mention my personal thoughts in a separate comment
So a bunch of researchers lead by Michael Peleg made a study further analyzing causational link from another study by Yael Stein from 2011. To sum up Yael's study in short, Yael found that their 47 patients (military and occupational) got sick with cancer and tumors after being exposed to varius agents including EMF/RFR.
Results: 15 patients developed cancer with latent periods < 5y and 12 patients with latent periods between 5y and 10y. The remaining 20 patients had longer latent periods In the <5y latency group there were 8 hematolymphatic cancers and 9 solid tumours – testis, head & neck (including brain) and GI tract. In both the <5y and 5-9y latency groups there were patients exposed to intense levels of EMF, to several frequencies of EMF, or to EMF in combination with IR or other exposures. There were patients with direct body contact, or were in direct line of focus from point sources, or worked in small, electronically dense environments. In the >10y latency group there were more patients with intermittent exposures or exposures at older ages.
Conclusions: The data suggest that cancer in young workers may be associated with intense severe exposures to EMF and short latent periods, especially for hematolymphatic cancers. The findings state the case for (1) more careful modelling of exposure sources and penetration into the body, (2) preventive and protective measures based on control of exposure at source, barriers, and personal protection and (3) exploring low-exposure-low risk relationships for latent periods <10 y
^ Note that in the paper itself they list several limitations including obviously small sample size, lack of in depth dose-response relationship, it being a case series that already has limitations for causation, no control group, and no adjustment for any confounding factors.
Based on the refererred study, Michael focuses on the patients that suffered from HL and testicular cancer specifically (Around 25 patients in total, quite possibly due to their relation to RFR) and tries to use PF value calculation to determine causality between RFR and these cancers. This is explained more under their materials and methods pages and it will make this thread too long as this is wee bit complex.. But I think this definition helps sum it up a bit
PF is the proportion of a specific cancer type relative to the total number of cancer cases in the group of patients. We use the abbreviation PF for both the “relative” and “percentage” definitions and mark by “%” the values expressed as percentage. Consistent and statistically significant association of unusual PF of a definite cancer type with some agent such as RFR exposure suggest an association of the cancer with this agent. We studied hematolymphatic (HL) and testicular cancers. We denote by H the cancer type, in this paper HL or testes. The observed PF, denoted PFobs (the subscript stands for “Observed”), is calculated by dividing the number NH of patients with cancer of type H by the total number N of cancer patients in this group. PFobs = Nh/N
Their results for both HL cancer and testicular stating that the PF of HL and testicular cancer was high showing increased risk between RFR and the cancers (according to both their abstract and below quotes). More found in their results + discussion section (aside from separate studies referenced)
We found that the proportion PF of HL cancer in the group of patients was 40%, while the expected PF for this age and gender profile is 23.4%. The p-value, that is, the chance that at least 19 patients with HL cancers in Stein et al. (2011), were afflicted at random in the group of 47 patients under the hypothesis of no causation by radiation, is smaller than 1% (p < 0.01). Thus, the chance of such PF increase occurring at random is small. See Table 3. Influence of the exposure to ELF: Three of the 47 patients were not exposed to RFR but to ELF alone, none of those had HL cancer. To verify the link between the high HL PF and the RFR exposure we repeated the HL PF analysis on the 23 patients who were exposed to RFR only and not to ELF. The results showed the same characteristics as the whole group reported above: 10 patients out of 23 had HL cancers, HL PF=43%, HL PF expected for the age and gender profile 25%, pvalue=0.037 < 0.05. We infer that the results of the whole group are a good estimate of the specific RFR influence. The data do not reveal whether ELF is carcinogenic or not since not enough patients were exposed to ELF alone to perform the PF calculation. Applying the same analysis on all male patients and testicular cancer in Stein et al. (2011), yielded PFobs very similar to the one expected in the unexposed general population (p-value of 0.55). The normal PFobs and non-significant p-value of testicular cancers compared to the highly elevated PF for HL adds a check on our procedure: a method error increasing the PF of the HL cancers while not affecting the PF of the testicular cancers is less likely
In the end they end up claiming they have a case for cause and effect,
We have presented evidence supporting the case for a cause-effect relationship between radio and radar radiation and HL cancers in occupational/military settings. Our case series showed an increased PF for HL cancers relative to all cancers. The high PF for multiple primaries adds to the case for a causeeffect relationship in those occupationally exposed.
And also
Overall, the excess risk for HL and other cancers in occupational groups complements the findings of brain tumors in cellphone users. These epidemiologic findings together with experimental studies on RFR and carcinogenicity make a coherent case for a cause-effect relationship. We are unable to find alternative explanations.
Note: I might have missed some information that I didn't include from both stein and michael's studies. However compiling these two esp. michael's would make the post too long and I decided to just try my best to oversimplify it and mention what sections to go to get more details