We Fact-Checked 8 Viral Claims. Here's What We Found.
Contents
- "Your smartphone is listening to your conversations to serve you ads."
- "Romantic love only lasts about three years."
- "The Bermuda Triangle swallows ships and planes at an inexplicably high rate."
- "Napoleon Bonaparte was unusually short."
- "The James Webb Space Telescope has disproved the Big Bang."
- "Einstein failed math as a child."
- "Cleopatra lived closer in time to the Moon landing than to the construction of the Great Pyramid."
- "Put in 10,000 hours of practice and you'll become world-class at anything."
- Why Viral Claims Are So Often Wrong — And How to Check
Some claims are so widely shared they feel like common knowledge. You've heard them at dinner tables, seen them in documentaries, and — if you're honest — repeated a few of them yourself. We ran eight of the most circulated ones through Lenz and the results are not what most people expect.
"Your smartphone is listening to your conversations to serve you ads."
What's being shared: You mention a product out loud — never type it, never search it — and ten minutes later it's in your Instagram feed. The phone is clearly listening.
What the evidence shows: No credible, independent study has found that smartphones access microphones to serve targeted ads. The CMG marketing pitch deck that went viral in 2024 claiming exactly this was subsequently walked back by the company itself. Multiple independent researchers have deliberately triggered this scenario in controlled conditions and found no evidence of audio-based ad targeting. What actually explains the "eerie" coincidence: hyper-accurate behavioural targeting based on location data, browsing patterns, and shared device graphs — which can feel indistinguishable from listening, but isn't.
"Romantic love only lasts about three years."
What's being shared: The honeymoon phase has a biological expiry date. Once the dopamine fades, you're left with habit — not love. There's science behind this.
Romantic love typically lasts no more than three years in most relationships.False
What the evidence shows: There is science behind part of this — but the claim conflates two different things. Early-stage passionate intensity (the racing heart, the obsessive thinking) does fade within roughly 1–3 years for most people. That part is well-supported. But romantic love broadly — attachment, intimacy, companionship, and yes, desire — doesn't follow the same timeline. Neuroimaging studies have found activation patterns consistent with romantic love in couples together for 20+ years. The American Psychological Association and Harvard Medical School both explicitly distinguish passionate intensity from romantic love as a construct.
"The Bermuda Triangle swallows ships and planes at an inexplicably high rate."
What's being shared: There's a stretch of the Atlantic between Miami, Bermuda, and Puerto Rico where vessels disappear more often than anywhere else — and no one can explain why.
What the evidence shows: Lloyd's of London — arguably the world's foremost authority on maritime risk — does not charge higher insurance premiums for vessels crossing the Bermuda Triangle. That's not a throwaway fact: it means the world's risk assessors see no statistical anomaly there. The Bermuda Triangle has roughly the same disappearance rate as any comparable section of heavily trafficked ocean. Many of the famous "mysterious disappearances" attributed to it occurred outside the triangle's boundaries entirely, or had documented conventional explanations that were omitted in the retelling.
"Napoleon Bonaparte was unusually short."
What's being shared: Napoleon was a small man with a big ego — roughly 5'2" — and his aggression was compensation for his stature. It's practically a psychological archetype.
Napoleon Bonaparte was shorter than the average adult male of his time.False
What the evidence shows: Napoleon's recorded height was "5 pieds 2 pouces" — but in pre-metric French units, not Imperial inches. That converts to approximately 5'7" (1.68 m). The average French male of his era stood around 5'4" (1.65 m). Napoleon was average height, possibly slightly above. The confusion originates from a unit conversion error that British propaganda then amplified, aided by cartoonist James Gillray's deliberately unflattering caricatures. The "Napoleon complex" is built on a measurement mistake.
"The James Webb Space Telescope has disproved the Big Bang."
What's being shared: JWST pointed at the early universe and found galaxies that shouldn't exist if the Big Bang model were correct. Scientists are quietly panicking. The theory is collapsing.
What the evidence shows: This is false — and NASA has explicitly said so. What JWST actually found was that early galaxies are larger, brighter, and more mature than existing galaxy formation models predicted. That is a genuine and significant discovery. But galaxy formation models are not the Big Bang theory. The Big Bang's core evidence — cosmic microwave background radiation, the expansion of the universe, primordial nucleosynthesis — remains uncontradicted by JWST's findings. Scientists revising their galaxy formation models in response to new data is exactly how science is supposed to work. The "Big Bang disproved" narrative traces to fringe and non-scientific sources that mischaracterised normal scientific model refinement as theoretical collapse.
"Einstein failed math as a child."
What's being shared: Even the greatest mind of the 20th century struggled in school. The story is comforting — proof that bad grades don't predict future genius.
Albert Einstein performed poorly in mathematics during his years as a student.False
What the evidence shows: Einstein's actual school records contradict this entirely. His 1896 Swiss Matura certificate shows perfect 6/6 scores in algebra, geometry, and physics. He had mastered calculus before age 15. His one notable academic setback was failing the entrance exam to the ETH Zürich polytechnic — at age 16, two years younger than the intended applicant age, and only because his French-language scores were weak. The myth likely originates from a misreading of the Swiss grading scale, where 6 is the top mark — and has been misread as 1 being best, making his 1s look like failures.
"Cleopatra lived closer in time to the Moon landing than to the construction of the Great Pyramid."
What's being shared: Most people place Cleopatra firmly in the "ancient Egypt" mental category — pyramids, pharaohs, the same era.
What the evidence shows: This one is true — and the gap is significant. Cleopatra died in 30 BCE, roughly 2,000 years before the Apollo 11 landing in 1969. The Great Pyramid of Giza was completed around 2500 BCE, placing it roughly 2,500 years before Cleopatra. She was separated from the pyramids by as much time as she was from us. The pyramids were ancient history to Cleopatra. Julius Caesar, when he visited Egypt, was also closer in time to us than to the pyramid builders.
"Put in 10,000 hours of practice and you'll become world-class at anything."
What's being shared: Mastery is democratic. Anyone can reach the top of any field with enough deliberate effort. Malcolm Gladwell popularised this idea from research by psychologist K. Anders Ericsson, and it became gospel in productivity culture.
The 10,000-hour rule reliably predicts the attainment of expertise in a given field.False
What the evidence shows: The 10,000-hour figure was an average pulled from one study of violinists — and Ericsson himself repeatedly distanced himself from how Gladwell framed it. A meta-analysis of 88 studies found that deliberate practice explains just 18–26% of skill variance across domains. The rest is accounted for by genetics, quality of instruction, starting age, and individual learning rates. Some chess grandmasters have achieved mastery in as few as 3,000 hours; others practised for over 25,000 hours and never got there. The rule flattens enormous individual variation into a single encouraging number — and that number isn't even the point of the original research.
We broke this down in depth in Episode 10 of the Lenz podcast — well worth a listen if you want to go further into what Ericsson's research actually says.
Why Viral Claims Are So Often Wrong — And How to Check
Across these eight claims, the verdicts break down like this: six False, one Misleading, one True. That tracks with our broader library — across 400+ verified claims, roughly 72% are False or Misleading.
The pattern isn't random. The claims that spread furthest tend to be the ones that feel true: they confirm something we already half-believe, they're simple, and they're hard to quickly disprove in conversation. Napoleon's height feels right because the archetype is culturally entrenched. Smartphones feel like they're listening because behavioural targeting is that accurate.
Feeling like something is true and it being true are different things. That gap is what Lenz is built for.
Lenz is a research verification platform. Verdicts reflect structured evaluation of available evidence at the time of verification and are subject to revision as new evidence emerges. Nothing in this article constitutes professional advice.