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In June 2022, a Facebook post went viral about the life of British mathematician, logician, and cryptographer Alan Turing, including several claims such as a rumor about why a bite is taken out of the design of the Apple computer company's logo. The post became so popular that we noticed some Google users had started looking to see if its contents were true, searching for Turing with the word Snopes. Additionally, we also received inquiries from several readers that asked about the veracity of the claims. According to the Facebook post, Turing ended his own life in 1954 by eating an apple laced with cyanide poison, purportedly a final act carried out by the computer scientist after the way he was treated by the British government for being gay. The post also said that Turing saved millions of lives during World War II and even served as the inspiration for the Apple logo. We found that most of the claims in the post were true, for reasons we'll outline below. The viral copied-and-pasted Facebook post about Turing's life, which we refer to as copypasta, read as follows: An alternate version of this post began with the words, Celebrating Pride Month 2022. It's true that Turing died at the age of 41 on June 7, 1954. His death was originally ruled to be a suicide. However, decades later, the circumstances surrounding his passing were called into question. First, we'll look to reporting from The Guardian newspaper that was published four days following his death. On June 11, the paper printed that a pathologist and a coroner both concluded that Turing had died by suicide: Nearly six decades later, the BBC published reporting that called into question the original suicide verdict. Jack Copeland, a distinguished professor at The University of Canterbury, told the BBC in 2012 that Turing's death may have been an accident, citing various data that led him to believe he may not have purposely taken his own life. The reporting also said Copeland believed the evidence would not today be accepted as sufficient to establish a suicide verdict. The Facebook post claimed that Turing killed himself because the British government chemically castrated, humiliated, and prosecuted him for being gay. We found that this information about the government's treatment of Turing was true. According to reporting from PBS NewsHour, Turing's death in 1954 came just two years following him being outed as gay. At the time, homosexuality was a crime: Hodges also added that Turing dealt with it with as much humor and defiance as you could muster, continuing to do his work despite it being obvious to friends that the punishment was traumatizing. In 2009, Creative Bits interviewed Rob Janoff, the creator of the Apple computer company's logo. Counter to what was written in the Facebook post, Janoff revealed that Turing had not, in fact, inspired its design, and that the rumor was nothing more than an urban legend. According to Janoff, the truth about the idea behind the design of the Apple logo was much simpler. Taking a bite out of the piece of fruit was something just about everyone across the world could relate to, he said: The last claims made in the Facebook post were true, including that Turing was regarded as the father of computer science and decrypted Enigma machines around the time of World War II, saving millions of lives in the process. In 2014, actor Benedict Cumberbatch starred in the film titled, The Imitation Game. The movie was inspired by a 1983 biography of Turing that was authored by Hodges. In sum, most of the claims in the Facebook post about the life and death of Turing were true. For this reason, we have rated this fact check as, Mostly True.
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