With 6.3 million followers, UberFacts is one of the bigger Twitter accounts out there (by contrast, Zooey Deschanel has 5.3 million followers, and the Wall Street Journal has 4.1 million), and it’s gotten there via an endless stream of crazy-but-true facts. Except, a few places are reporting that UberFacts uses a very flimsy definition of “fact.” Over at Paleofuture, Matt Novak fact checked each of UberFacts’ 64 tweets over the course of 24 hours, and found that 38 of them were true, fifteen of them were debatable (“true-ish) and the last eleven (including the slightly offensive one below) were false. Not great odds.
In the meantime, Buzzfeed reached out to Uberfacts to ask about their truth-stretching shenanigans, and received a pretty snarky email from Uberfacts mastermind Kris Sanchez (“You always have the option to unfollow the page. That would probably be the most logical thing to do instead of wasting your valuable time complaining about it. I’m pretty sure your thousands of followers on Twitter would like to read something more interesting… I know my MILLIONS of followers do.”) When Buzzfeed called Uberfacts out on it, Sanchez denied ever sending the email and suggested that he may have been hacked …
