The Internet is a vast landscape of knowledge just waiting to be mined for your personal edification. But just like Winston Churchill didn’t say “Somebody’s got a case of the Mondays!” just because someone slapped a caption on a photo of the guy and plastered it all over Facebook, not everything you read about fast food is necessarily true.

Namely, no, McDonald’s is not using lean textured beef trimmings treated with ammonia, aka “pink slime” in its burgers, and hasn’t since 2011, the company says.

This, after at least one photo has been making the rounds on social media (I’ve seen it at least three times on Facebook in the past week), with the caption: “McDonald’s hamburgers are only 15% real beef. The other 85% is meat filler cleansed with Ammonia which causes stomach and intestinal cancer.”

Due to the building hubbub, McDonald’s is trying to stem the tide of misinformation:

“Lean finely textured beef treated with ammonia, what some individuals call ‘pink slime’ or select lean beef trimmings, is not used in our burgers. Any recent reports that it is are false,” it says in an explanation on its site under the question topic, “Do you use so-called ‘pink slime’ in your burgers?”

Are there other reasons someone might choose not to chow down at Mickey D’s? Sure, and you’re free to live your own life how you see fit — eat a salad, eat snails or chow down on the biggest bacon cheeseburger you’ve ever seen, if that’s what you want. But spreading information that is just flat out false isn’t going to help anybody.

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