Crap Detection: Stories from the Sochi Olympics

        The 2014 Winter Olympics in Sochi, Russia, have drawn the world’s attention over the past two weeks. Millions of people all around the world watched as a few thousands athletes gathered in Western Russia to compete in various winter based sports. The media coverage of any Olympic Games tends to be composed of interesting and dramatic news stories. The games are just as a much a theatrical performance by the host country as they are a tournament of athletic performances. As such, the news stories that are spread by various media sources during the Olympics almost always have a mixture of accurate news and untrustworthy claims. The Sochi Games have been no different. I chose to examine two major news stories that broke during the Winter Olympics.

        When the Olympic Games are held, the host country must house and entertain thousands of athletes and media personnel. Due to the poor living conditions in the region of Russia hosting the Olympic Games, many of the Olympic villages contained numerous problems. The Washington Post ran a story on February that portrayed many of the problems journalists were running into. The link is as follows: http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/worldviews/wp/2014/02/04/journalists-at-sochi-are-live-tweeting-their-hilarious-and-gross-hotel-experiences/. Many websites had previously been floating false images of the Russian communities hosting the games, in an effort to poke fun at the host country or protest the fact that Russia was even allowed to host the games given the country’s economic deficiencies. Upon further research though, I came to trust this story for a few reasons. The first was the reputation of the publisher. The Washington Post is a very well-known and trusted American news source. It is a very popular newspaper and washingtonpost.com ranks as the 88^th most popular website in the United States according to Alexa.com. Additionally, within the article, many tweets from well-respected journalists were included displaying the gross problems they had encountered. I followed the links to these journalist’s twitter pages, and the tweets included in the story were in fact on their twitter feeds. I subsequently decided this was a truthful story, and my crap detection system concluded these stories of brown tap water and unfinished rooms were in fact taking place in Russia. The same cannot be said for the next story.

        During the opening ceremonies of the Sochi Games, the world watched as one of the Olympic rings in Russia’s opening performance encountered a mechanical issue and did not properly open. The following link is to the story I examined: http://dailycurrant.com/2014/02/08/man-responsible-for-olympic-ring-mishap-found-dead-in-sochi/. On February 8, a news source called The Daily Currant ran a story stating that Boris Avdeyev, the technical specialist responsible for the mishap, had been found dead. The story includes quotes from guests of the hotel where Aydeyev’s body had been found, police investigators, Olympic athletes, and even the Russian Olympic Committee coordinator. The story was suspiciously written, and did not include a reference to any sources other than the names of the people supposedly interviewed. It was quite clear after reading the entire article that the content was simply not believable, yet two of my Facebook friends shared the story on their walls. If you made it to the comments section of the page, you could clearly see that most people had realized the article was fake. Additionally, dailycurrant.com is not a trusted website and ranks as the 1978^th most popular website in the United States. If you utilize common sense, look for supporting documentation, and fact check, crap detection is fairly straight forward.

        As a side note, the two most popular websites I know of for fake news stories or hoaxes are The Onion and The Borowitz Report.