Latest Stories By Grace Abels

We need to know the truth about tampons. Period.  After a viral TikTok warned that a common ingredient in tampons was linked to cancer, many were left wondering if their preferred menstrual products were harming their bodies.  Concerns over titanium dioxide, used by many tampon brands to keep the string looking white, spread to Facebook […]

Twin Facebook pages advertise themselves as providing newsy and up-to-the-minute coverage of Russia’s war in Ukraine. But on a given day, their followers might see videos claiming Norwegians raided Russian ships, Vladimir Putin was defeated on “all fronts,” or that a single British ship blocked a Russian fleet. None of those headlines are true. But […]

With the flood of misinformation saturating social media, there are too many claims and not enough human fact-checkers to do the tedious work required. Can automation help with fact-checking?  Fact-checking organizations around the globe have been developing systems that automate or use artificial intelligence to streamline and accelerate elements of the fact-checking process. On Friday, […]

In 2020, an Oregon-based nonprofit that works to supply free menstrual products to communities in need, distributed over 2 million tampons. In 2021, it distributed over 1.5 million.  Halfway through 2022, the group, called PERIOD, has only been able to send out 200,000 tampons, according to Kate Barker Swindell, the nonprofit’s service and operations manager. […]