I know this sounds a little ridiculous, but I need this settled once and for all: what’s the deal with Snapple’s “Real Facts” campaign? Many people I know operate on the assumption that they’re true unless the fact-writers make a mistake, but I’ve also heard it claimed that they’re 50% false by design.
Certainly there *are *mistakes, and some are worded so poorly that whether you call them true or not depends on how generous feel like being, that much is pretty non-debatable. Still, I can’t shake the feeling that there used to be a section of Snapple’s website where you entered the fact number on the cap and they’d reveal if it was true or false, and now I can’t find any evidence of this anywhere on the web. Hell, I even found newspaper puff-pieces about the inaccuracy of Snapple facts that only talk about “occasional errors”, but make no reference to the idea of the company running a tongue-in-cheek disinformation campaign.
Meanwhile: here’s a picture of a Snapple cap that’s apparently being pretty straightforward about it:
Huh. Okay. I’d considered the possibility, but I have a really poor eye for detecting Photoshoppery, admittedly; if you think that’s definitively shopped I’ll accept that.
But the larger issue still puzzles me – I’m not basing it on that image, it’s just what I scared up on an image search. I also still have a pretty vivid memory of Snapple once having that "fact-checker"section of website (it had an cartoony image of a large machine, you entered the cap number, and you saw a little animation of the cap rolling into the machine before it quoted the fact and declared it true or false). This was years ago, though – no sign of it now.
The term “Real Facts” always appears in quotes on these caps, incidentally.
The “Real Fact #0” looks like it could be photoshopped in, but only because all of the text, with the possible exception of “Get all the ‘Real Facts’ at snapple.com” is photoshopped in. There is no “Real Fact #0” and if there were, there would be hundreds of different photos of it on the web, and not just this single picture.
Okay, then. I’m still interested in the possible urban legend regarding 50% being untrue by design, whether or not there was a cap about it. See above – I feel like someone must know something about the history of the campaign, here. To my knowledge it’s been running since the late 90s, at least.
I recall quite vividly looking up stacks of snapple facts on the old website, and plenty of them coming up false – we did this at my old job at a pizzeria on breaks for a few days, before we got bored of it. We had a lot of caps to work with.
Which furthers my conviction they’re just screwing with us. Hell, even fact #1 is wrong. And #31 is the old myth about people accidentally swallowing spiders while they sleep, which pretty much everyone knows is false.
^ New York City =/= Manhattan, though. They might try to make the claim based on the political boundaries of 1785, or something, but generally it’s New York and not Manhattan that’s considered a former capital.
Update: I was stuck waiting for someone to show up and in front of an internet connection, so I figured I’d have a look at that list of facts and see how many of the first 100 survived a google check.
I extended the benefit of the doubt to a few I couldn’t find anything on, but still over half appear to be false. :smack:
I’ll share the results if anyone is curious, but I’m perfectly willing to accept that I might be alone in my (mild) outrage, here.
I don’t know, if I saw even a blog post that had 50% of its facts wrong, I think my reaction would be “this is an extraordinarily bad blog post” and not “this is the norm for blog posts I have read.”
A certain amount of the internet is just people talking, and I’m sure that’s worse, but I’m less offended when it’s just people chatting and not stuff being presented as true with some pseudo-authority.
Of course, OMGFacts or whatever it is is definitely just as bad as Snapple. As are many chain emails.
The way you posted this is ambiguous. I cannot tell whether “This is false” is part of the “Real Fact”, or whether it is your comment on it.
I am here now to report that Real Fact #36 is simply, “A duck’s quack doesn’t echo.” That is patently false, leading me to conclude that there may be other “Real Facts” which are also false.
They also have spelling/grammar errors.
Wikipedia says that Manahattan ranks #2, and that Kalawao County, Hawaii is about half the size of Manhattan.
This is either wrong, or another spelling error. The “C” in VCR stands for “cassette”. The first recorders were on reel-to-reel tapes, and were called VTRs. The convenient cassette format came later.
