This year should be the year that defines the "new normal"-in our opinion, it may even need to be redone.

No such luck. First, we saw a large-scale misinformation campaign that tried to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election. We have never fought such a well-funded effort before to try to weaken Americans’ trust in the democratic process, and we have never seen so many extreme ideas from marginal political groups into the mainstream. Entering this year, we carried out a complex operation to closely monitor the hidden corners of the Internet where voter fraud conspiracy occurred.

However, nothing can prepare us for January 6, 2021. From cellphone footage that allegedly showed Congress police helping Trump supporters break into the Federal Building to the former president’s comments and whereabouts during the attack, our newsroom scrambled to sort out facts from fiction in real time-in a historic day In the months that followed.

In addition to Joe Biden's presidential inauguration, Democrats' (again) efforts to impeach Trump, the ongoing civil rights movement aimed at drawing attention to police brutality, and the effectiveness of COVID-19 vaccination Apart from the intimidation rumors, all of this is the same thing. Pseudo-scientific arguments are widely circulated, and the work to slander scientists as the main solution to the pandemic is still overwhelmed by readers’ questions about how vaccination actually affects the human immune system.

Then, throughout the summer, we encountered the COVID-19 variant delta. She seems to be with the company (omicron).

However, no matter what the core theme of our 2021 report is, we have met the urgent need for tools to help improve people’s media literacy. Behind every Snopes rating is fact-based explanatory news, which relies on thoroughly censored sources and backgrounds that other media may overlook.

We thank you for your support, and we look forward to more debunks in 2022-maybe, just maybe, it will be a little more "normal" than the last time.

Snopes readers have a keen sense of news - and an unstoppable desire to learn more about misinformation on the Internet. In 2021, readers searched nearly 8 million unique terms on the Snopes website. Among them, some iterations of “COVID-19” and some form of related “vaccine” ranked first, followed by “Biden” and “Fu”. "Odd" and "Trump". "

In a year full of misinformation, the Snopes team has gained insight into some of the most controversial content on the Internet. Such stories published in 2021 include:

Picture from Facebook / Celina 52 Truck Stop

Rank from the highest number of views.

All these pages will be released in 2021.

Image courtesy of the White House/Instagram

Picture from NOAA/Public Domain

Image courtesy of Joe Schildhorn/Patrick McMullan Photo from Getty Images

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