Last summer, as the number of migrants and refugees fleeing to Europe began to soar, so did the number of news stories about them. But German Karolin Schwarz, 30, was finding that not all of those stories were true.
On Feb. 8, as the number of rumors and fake stories about them surged, Schwarz, a business consultant, and her colleague Lutz Helm, a software developer, created a "hoax map" to debunk them.
"We were seeing more and more rumors about refugees committing crimes or receiving excessive health care, [and] we wanted to create something to counter this trend and maybe give people a tool to check up on stories they have been hearing," Schwarz told Mashable via email on Wednesday.
The interactive "hoax map" pinpoints the locations of each fake story. Clicking on the pins opens a small window with a brief summary of each false report and a link to where it originated.
The map lists 243 "hoaxes" in all, with 187 points marked across Germany, according to German newspaper Sueddeutsche Zeitung's count.
Asked about the most absurd stories she's found and mapped, Schwarz points to one that surfaced in Bielefeld, Germany, in which a Muslim man was said to have ripped a toilet from the wall in a refugee shelter and tossed it out of the window.
Among them is also the much publicized story of a 13-year-old girl in Berlin who said she had been raped by three refugees before later admitting to making it up. German prosecutors also said the story was untrue. The tale, widely covered in Russian state media, spawned protests in Germany's Russian communities and caused a diplomatic fight between Berlin and Moscow.
There are also many fake stories about refugees being given coupons for brothel visits, Schwarz said.
Responses to the hoax map have been mostly positive. German Justice Minister Heiko Maas even praised it on Twitter, saying it presented "facts instead of prejudice."
There have been some negative reactions, though, from far-right organizations involved in spreading the stories, Schwarz said.
Migrants and refugees continue to arrive in Europe by the thousands each day. More than one million people arrived on the continent last year. Most came by sea via Turkey to Greece before migrating north to other European Union countries.
As migrants and refugees continue coming, Schwarz hopes her map helps Europeans separate factual stories about them from fictional ones.
"We also want to create a discourse about this phenomenon, because these rumors have definitely been used to create an atmosphere of distrust towards refugees," she said.