Diving Into the Deep End of Baseball

It’s no secret that restaurants have a “Secret Menu” for example in n out with their “animal style” fries and burgers that are not listed on the menu. A common thing I see online is people posting secret menu items for certain restaurants and later on I find out it was made up and it doesn’t exist. Im going to dive into how to determine when someone posts a secret menu item if it is legitimate or not.

Recently It has been circulating that Taco Bell had released all of these different desserts. I had a friend try to order the caramel Apple Empanada and the worker looked at her like she was crazy. It goes to show that not everything we see online is accurate.

1. Source: Its important to look at the source that posted about the menu items, was it a random person online or was it from the Taco Bell website? Was it someone posting that this is in the works and is going to come out or was it someone posting something they wish Taco Bell had and pretending that they do so other people see it and talk about it.
2. Confirmation Bias: https://www.niemanlab.org/2019/06/can-you-spot-a-fake-photo-online-your-level-of-experience-online-matters-a-lot-more-than-contextual-clues/ This article mentions confirmation bias which is very important. It says if you agree with something you are more likely to believe it is true and when you disagree with something you are more likely to believe it is not true. In this case when viewing a new menu item or a secret menu item when it’s something you think looks good and you want to try you are more subject to believe it exists.
3. Reverse Image search: If you go on google and search reverse image search it comes up with a spot to copy and paste and image where it then does a background check on the image and tells your more information on the image and where it origniated as well as giving you similar posts and photos to the original.

4. Building on verification: https://s3.eu-central-1.amazonaws.com/datajournalismcom/handbooks/Verification-Handbook-3.pdf The verification handbook has a lot of important tools for verifying a questioning images. They listed 10 important questions to think of;

1. are you looking at the original version
2. Do you know who captured the Photo
3. Do you know where the photo was captured
4. Do you know when the photo was captured
5. DO you know why the photo was captured
6. What Is it?
7. What does it mean?
8. Who made it?
9. What does it show?
10. What did it mean?

for posts that are made up and edited online you want to think about who posted and as well as why and when.

5. How widely and how long has it circulated: A big part of social media is reposting and sharing content. Its very easy for lies and misinformation to spread quick especially when its something small and silly like a fun new menu item. The more you can find online about it and the more information you see the more likely it is to be real. When you just see a picture that says new but you cant find the item anywhere online or see a physical picture or video of someone trying it, you then know its fake.

We all love our new menu items and secret menu items but its not fun to try to order one and be told it doesnt exist. Hopefully these tools can be helpful when determining if a post is real or fake.