About Therealitycheckroom
Therealitycheckroom exists because the version of a claim that reaches you is rarely the version that started. A careful sentence in a report becomes a confident headline, then a screenshot, then a thing everyone knows. We bring the claim back in and put it next to its source.
Who it’s for
Anyone who has looked at a post, an ad or a forwarded text and thought, is that actually true? That includes parents checking a health claim, students citing a statistic, shoppers reading a label, and people worried a message on their phone is a scam. We write in plain English for readers in the United States, Canada, the UK, Australia and anywhere else, with a soft spot for claims that travel around South Carolina’s Grand Strand, where we’re based.
What we cover
- Fact Checks: Specific claims, traced back to where they started and measured against the record.
- Misinformation: How false and distorted information is made, moved and believed.
- Viral Claims: The post your relative shared and the thread everyone quote-posted.
- Consumer Myths: Product claims, money rules of thumb and “everybody knows” advice about what you buy.
- Scams: How current scams are built, what they ask you for and where their story falls apart.
- Media Literacy: The skills under every check: reading past the headline, judging a source, spotting a cropped chart.
How a check is written
Every piece follows the same five steps: claim, source, evidence, context, verdict. We quote the claim exactly. We find the original source and check that it’s current. We read the primary evidence ourselves, whether that’s a statute, a study, a court record or a dataset, and we link to it so you can read it too.
Verdicts come from a fixed list: true, false, misleading, unproven, outdated, partly true and missing context. We never mark a claim false because we dislike who said it, and we never present uncertainty as certainty. When the honest answer is we don’t know yet, that’s the verdict.
Our standards, in short
- No invented sources, quotes or numbers.
- No selective quoting. If the full sentence changes the meaning, we print the full sentence.
- No accusations without documents.
- A screenshot is a lead, not proof.
- Corrections are made openly. Send them through our contact page.