The Food Babe tries (and fails) to thwart skeptics with technology

Vani Hari by the Charlotte Video Project, licensed CC BY 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons.

Vani Hari, aka “The Food Babe,” has been a recent repeated target of criticism both from skeptics and the mainstream media.  She has not taken this criticism well, lashing out at her critics.

She has also been caught deleting content from her social media pages and her own website after it became the target of derision. This is not new to skeptics; it happens all the time. That’s why I’ve recommended on this blog that all skeptics be very familiar with the use of web archiving tools. You never know when the content you criticize might be “disappeared” by its embarrassed author, so it is always good to have a copy safely archived.

But Ms. Hari (or her technical staff or SEO consultant) have noticed this, and have started taking measures to thwart skeptics. In November 2014 they made a change on her web server that prevents skeptic use of the most popular archiving tool, the Internet Wayback Machine, for her site.

And just this week they have attempted to prevent skeptics from using another tool that entered our arsenal right from the pages of this blog – Do Not Link.  This is a URL shortener I recommend for linking to pages you wish to criticize without giving them a “Google boost.” Last week the Food Babe made a change that would cause any Do Not Link URL to the site to fail to arrive – denying her own site readers while annoying skeptics.

But this latest technical measure has completely failed. Read on as I explain what they did, how you can work around it, and why measures like this will always fail.

Simple WHOIS check unravels Mike Adams’ latest threats

Partial screen shot from the ill-fated Monsanto Collaborators website touted by Mike Adams

I know I haven’t been keeping up with the blog here. As you can tell from the top menu bar and my social media feeds, I have a number of different projects and sometimes it’s hard to balance them all. Plus I have some cool new super-secret projects in the works that are taking up my time. And I do have a day job too!  But fear not, I have several posts that I’m working on for this blog and activity will pick up soon, especially as we ramp up into DragonCon at the end of this month.

But for today I just wanted to offer some kudos to another blog where an investigation appeared last week that would not have been out of place right here on Skeptools. Nick Price, posting at the newly-launched blog This Week in Pseudoscience looked into a controversial post by Mike Adams (the so-called “Health Ranger” who many skeptics call the “Health Danger”).

Measuring the growth in local skeptic groups via Meetup.com

I’ve written a number of times about finding ways to measure skepticism and skeptic activity.  How can we know whether skepticism is having an effect if we don’t measure what we do?

But polls and surveys can be tedious and expensive! So grass-roots skeptics often need to look for more ad-hoc ways to measure things. Fortunately many such opportunities present themselves online, some of which I wrote about at the JREF blog back in 2011.

Simply knowing how many skeptics there are is one useful metric, but there is no single skeptic membership organization that could conduct such a count. We’re spread across hundreds of local groups and affiliated with many different national organizations.

I could attempt a survey of local groups, but that would be a time consuming process – even more so than my ongoing census of skeptic podcasts. But what if there were a place online that kept track of local skeptic groups? That started me thinking about Meetup.com…

Web archiving is an important skeptic tool

You may have noticed a new badge appeared recently on the right side of this blog that says Keep Libel Laws out of Science. It has to do with an ongoing legal case in England where a major chiropractic association is suing science writer Simon Singh for libel over an article in which he referred to certain chiropractic procedures as “bogus.” I encourage you to click the badge and sign the petition.

Today there was a fascinating development in this case that relates directly to skeptical software tools. Because the case hinges on whether or not chiros promote procedures they know to be “bogus”, skeptics have been scouring chiropractic websites in the UK looking for evidence of this. In response, another chiropractic association has advised its members to take down their websites entirely! This is stunning.

Internet Archive Wayback Machine

As skeptics one of the key things we do is hold woo-woos feet to the fire when they make ridiculous claims. Perhaps the most public place of all to make a claim is on a website, because it is instantaneously visible to everyone on earth who chooses to look. Tracking claims made on websites is thus an important skeptical technique.

But this move by the chiropractors reminds us that the web is mutable thing. Any content anywhere on the web can be changed at any time. Paranormalists and pseudoscientists can edit their web sites constantly to present a moving target or to remove evidence of their missteps. In order to do our jobs as skeptics, we need to be constantly aware of this and use tools to compensate. Fortunately such archival tools exist. One is the well-known Internet Wayback Machine, but several others (including commercial products) exist.

After the jump, I’ll talk more about some of the uses of these tools and show you how to use them as a skeptic.