Elk Grove puts fact check section on website to dispel 'rumors'

In an effort to dispel "rumors" circulating on social media, Elk Grove Village officials Thursday put a fact check section on the village website.

"Facebook serves a lot of good purposes. It's a way to interact with people," Mayor Craig Johnson said at a village board meeting this week. "But also a lot of times Facebook can be bad because people start throwing around innuendos and they have wrong information and people start taking it for gospel."

For instance, Johnson said, in the last year and a half he heard a bevy of rumors about whether Joe Caputo & Sons grocery store would really open. Some suggested it wasn't, because "the mayor doesn't like him, because the mayor owns stock in Jewel, because he had a fight with (owner) Nat Caputo, because (Caputo) decided he doesn't like the village," Johnson said.

The grocery store is expected to grand open at 7 a.m. Friday.

While Johnson said he doesn't "do computers (or) Facebook," he encouraged residents to call him at his listed home and business phone numbers if they have any questions about village government.

The fact check section of the village website is at elkgrove.org/residents/rumor-page.