What does this logo look like to you?
It might not look like much at first glance
but it did cause quite a stir online.
This logo was found on the side of a mobile COVID-19 testing truck.
The photo is real and so is the logo.
A viral post on Facebook claim that this logo represents Anubis,
the ancient Egyptian God of death and the afterlife.
The rumors circulated among groups tied to QAnon,
the once fringe conspiracy theory that has made its way into the mainstream.
QAnon members said the logo revealed a deep state plot against Americans.
They shared fears that these testing trucks were up to something nefarious.
Of course it turns out the logo is actually an aardvark.
An aardvark?
Yes, an aardvark, which I learned,
is an African mammal who is nocturnal and feeds largely on bugs.
Sarah Spencer, a journalist with factcheck.org,
ventured down the virtual rabbit hole to figure out where this logo came from
and how it ended up linked to an Egyptian death deity.
Sarah: We initially were presented with this meme on Facebook.
Why does COVID-19 testing facility have a logo of Anubis, the God of death?
The first step would be to do just a basic reverse image search.
It can give you a starting off point
and give you a sense of maybe how widespread something is.
You can see obviously where the person who put together this meme shows,
to select in red, indicating what they think is interesting about it.
That will often skew an image search
but you can also click and download,
and then put it into any photo editing software.
In a picture like this, I would crop it like that,
so that you get part of an actual picture.
Then you can plug that picture
into your standard reverse image search.
Here, in TinEye, you can select your cropped version.
In TinEye, unlike in Google,
you can sort by newest to oldest.
So in this case, it was used in a Philadelphia business journal -
a story about this area business that had started retooling its trucks
to be used as mobile testing units during COVID-19.
They identify the name of the company as Aardvark Mobile.
So then just a simple, very simple internet search,
a pretty obvious first result is the Aardvark Mobile Tours website
that shares the same logo that you see on the truck.
You see they have a mobile health care unit.
That looks pretty close.
Sarah: Very similar setup, yeah, very similar setup.
One thing that TinEye is really good at is finding
where images first started showing up online.
One of its first iterations showed up on 8KUN,
which is a message board that often is home to conspiracy theorists threads.
It's where a lot of conspiracy theories develop and then bubble up
before they start showing up on Facebook and Twitter.
Hari: So your tip to a general reader -
if they see an image that makes these kinds of claims,
what's the 1st thing they should have in the back of their mind?
What's the 1st thing they should do?
If you're scrolling through your social media, you see something
that really speaks to you and really feels right,
and you think, yes, that really solidifies what I think.
That should be a warning to you that it might be questionable.
Often you'll find that the facts that are included in memes
that feel the most right, are actually wrong.
The world feels scary right now
and the future feels unknown.
Reading something on the internet and assuming the worst,
seems almost reasonable.
But as Sarah said, if it feels right,
you might wanna check first.
And if something requires an elaborate explanation,
maybe there's a simpler answer.
Sometimes a logo is just a logo.
Sometimes an aardvark is just an aardvark.
And why, by the way, is this truck company named after an aardvark?
The owner of Aardvark Tours chose the name Aardvark
because it starts with AA and way back when,
when there were yellow pages in the phone book.
Sure, we had AA Carpet Cleaning, AAA Carpet Cleaning.
And aardvark starts with two A's.
So, that's how that came to be.
Until nex time.
Don't spread fake news. Keep it real.
I'm Hari Sreenivasan, and this is Take on Fake.
Thanks for watching.
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