Transgender athletes’ participation in competitions often stirs social media debate. A recent post stoked negative user reactions after claiming that transgender athletes complained about ill-fitting uniforms.
“Transwomen complain about uniforms crushing their balls during dominating performance,” read the text in a March 19 Facebook post. It featured a photo of four athletes.
(Screenshot from Facebook)
This post was flagged as part of Meta’s efforts to combat false news and misinformation on its News Feed. (Read more about our partnership with Meta, which owns Facebook and Instagram.)
But this didn’t happen. The claim originated from an article published in 2019 by Genesius Times, a satirical website.
The Genesius Times article included a doctored photo in which the athletes’ uniforms and the names on their racing bibs were altered.
The original photo showed Chinese runners Liao Mengxue, Fu Na, Tong Zenghuan and Yang Huizhen. In 2019, Liao and Tong placed in the women’s 400 meters at the National Track and Field Championships Finals in the Chinese province Heilongjiang, and they came under scrutiny when social media users said they looked like men.
According to the South China Morning Post, the Chinese Athletics Association said the two runners are female. World Athletics, formerly the International Association of Athletics Federations, listed the four athletes under “women” in its biographical summaries for the 2019 World Relays.
We found no proof that they complained about their uniforms.
After the Islamic State group that was once known as ISIS claimed responsibility for the March 22 terror attack on a Moscow concert venue, conspiracy theorist and InfoWars creator Alex Jones pointed a finger at former President Barack Obama.
“It is a fact that Obama created ISIS with the help of Israel,” Jones said in a March 23 X post.
Jones’ post was also reshared on Instagram, where it was flagged as part of Meta’s efforts to combat false news and misinformation on its News Feed. (Read more about our partnership with Meta, which owns Facebook and Instagram.)
(Screengrab from X)
In 2016, PolitiFact fact-checked a similar claim from former President Donald Trump that Obama “founded ISIS.” We rated that Pants on Fire.
The Islamic State group’s long, complex history predates Obama’s presidency, which started in 2009. The terrorist group’s founder and subsequent leaders have been well documented; Obama is not among them.
Jones also claimed that Obama had help from Israel, but we found no evidence to support this claim. The Anti-Defamation League said this is part of the antisemitic conspiracy theory that Israel is linked to the Islamic State group.
Experts told PolitiFact in 2016 that it could be argued Obama’s decision to withdraw troops from Iraq in 2011 contributed to the Islamic State group’s expansion in the region. But the group was active before Obama took office. During his presidency, the U.S. military targeted the Islamic State group and Obama said destroying the group was his “top priority.”
PolitiFact contacted Jones through InfoWars, but did not hear back.
When Jones made this claim, he shared another X post that said, “Here’s Obama admitting to training ISIS (ISIL),” above a 15-second clip of Obama.
In the clip, Obama said, “So, with the additional steps I ordered last month, we’re speeding up training of ISIL forces, including volunteers from Sunni tribes in Anbar Province.”
This social media post takes Obama’s remarks out of context. The clip is from a July 2015 press conference in which then-President Obama discussed efforts to fight the Islamic State group.
“Meanwhile, we continue to ramp up our training and support of local forces that are fighting ISIL on the ground. As I’ve said before, this aspect of our strategy was moving too slowly. But the fall of Ramadi (in Al Anbar province, Iraq) has galvanized the Iraqi government,” Obama said at the press conference. “So, with the additional steps I ordered last month, we’re speeding up training of ISIL forces, including volunteers from Sunni tribes in Anbar Province. More Sunni volunteers are coming forward. Some are already being trained, and they can be a new force against ISIL.”
Obama was not discussing training the Islamic State group’s members, but bolstering forces in the Middle East to combat the terrorist group.
The Islamic State group’s origins
The foundation of what is known today as the Islamic State group was laid in the 1990s and early 2000s, Stanford University researchers said.
In 2004, an Iraqi extremist group led by Abu Musab al-Zarqawi merged with al-Qaida to form al-Qaida in Iraq, or AQI, according to the National Counterterrorism Center. In 2006, following Zarqawi’s death, the terrorist group was renamed the Islamic State in Iraq, or ISI. In 2013, the name changed again to the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, or ISIS, which is sometimes translated from Arabic to the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant, or ISIL.
In 2014, the terrorist group’s then-leader, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, announced the establishment of a caliphate and renamed the group the Islamic State, the National Counterterrorism Center said. Baghdadi was killed in a U.S.-led raid in Syria in 2019, while Trump was president.
The Islamic State group has conducted and inspired numerous terrorist attacks worldwide, which killed and injured thousands of people. Although the Islamic State group no longer controls large parts of Iraq and Syria, the terrorist group remains active in the region and has affiliated groups elsewhere in the world, the National Counterterrorism Center said.
Our ruling
Jones claimed in an X post that “Obama created ISIS.”
The Islamic State group’s inception and its creators and leaders have been well documented. Obama did not create the terrorist group.
The group operated before Obama’s presidency. During Obama’s time in office, he made targeting the terrorist group a top priority.
La Guardia Nacional de Estados Unidos se está preparando para el eclipse del 8 de abril, pero no porque se espera que cause devastaciones.
Una publicación en TikTok del 19 de marzo dice: “Este 8 de abril sucederá un eclipse nunca antes visto en Estados Unidos, expertos dicen que será el eclipse más peligroso que ha habido, la guardia nacional se está preparando para este acontecimiento y aconsejan que estemos preparados”.
El video añadió que probablemente no habrá señal telefónica por semanas y que las personas deben guardar comida y llenar sus tanques de gasolina “porque no saben cuánto vaya a durar” el eclipse.
Otros videos en Facebook dicen cosas similares sobre el eclipse.
Las publicaciones fueron marcadas como parte del esfuerzo de Meta para combatir las noticias falsas y la desinformación en su plataforma. (Lea más sobre nuestra colaboración con Meta, propietaria de Facebook e Instagram).
El 8 de abril habrá un eclipse total del sol, el cual oscurecerá el cielo por algunos minutos, no por semanas. Pero no se espera que este eclipse porte un peligro extraordinario.
“La NASA no ha emitido ninguna declaración de que este eclipse es el más peligroso que ha habido”, dijo Sarah Frazier, jefa de comunicaciones de heliofísica de la NASA.
Una experta en eclipses también le dijo a PolitiFact que las personas solo tienen que tener en cuenta los riesgos de ver el eclipse sin lentes especializados que protegen la vista.
“Puedo confirmarte que este eclipse del 8 de abril NO es diferente en términos de peligro/seguridad que cualquier otro eclipse solar. Siempre es peligroso mirar al sol, ya sea durante un eclipse o no”, dijo la Dra. Jessica S. Warren, profesora de física y astronomía en Indiana University Northwest.
Oficiales de estados y pueblos en la trayectoria de totalidad del eclipse recomiendan que los residentes se preparen para la llegada de muchos turistas.
Por ejemplo, el Condado McCurtain, en Oklahoma, está en la trayectoria de totalidad del eclipse solar, haciéndolo un área que probablemente se llenará de personas el 8 de abril. Por eso, oficiales del departamento de manejo de emergencias del condado han pedido apoyo a la Guardia Nacional de Oklahoma.
La Guardia Nacional de Oklahoma dijo que apoyará a oficiales locales a lidiar con las multitudes. Su presencia no es porque el eclipse en sí vaya a ser devastador.
La Guardia Costera también tendrá barcos patrullando el lago Erie en Pennsylvania, ya que el eclipse también se verá en esta zona y varios planean observar desde el agua.
Oficiales del Condado Lorain en Ohio publicaron “consejos de preparación para residentes” para evitar problemas por un incremento de visitantes.
Ya que el eclipse vendrá un lunes, “es probable que muchos visitantes vengan el fin de semana y se queden en el área”, escribieron oficiales del Condado Lorain.
Los visitantes podrían causar “dificultades para acceder comida, gasolina, y suministros debido a problemas de tráfico” y “la pérdida de señal telefónica debido a una saturación del sistema es posible”, escribieron los oficiales. Ellos recomiendan comprar gasolina y guardar comida y bebidas antes del 6 de abril y que los residentes eviten viajar ese fin de semana.
Sin embargo, no encontramos que funcionarios de gestión de emergencias hayan aconsejado a las personas que viven fuera de la trayectoria del eclipse que se abastezcan de alimentos, agua o combustible antes del eclipse.
Nuestro veredicto
Un video en Facebook dice que el eclipse del 8 de abril “será el eclipse más peligroso que ha habido, la guardia nacional se está preparando para este acontecimiento”.
Pero La Guardia Nacional de Estados Unidos no se está preparando porque va a acontecer el eclipse más peligroso que ha habido, sino por la gran multitud de turistas que irán a verlo. Oficiales anticipan que las multitudes podrían causar estanques de tráfico y agotar la comida y gasolina.
La Guardia Nacional se movilizará en Oklahoma porque se espera que multitudes de personas visiten el área para ver la totalidad del eclipse. Oficiales en otras ciudades en la trayectoria del eclipse también han advertido a sus ciudadanos sobre la llegada de multitudes para ver el eclipse.
La NASA y una experta en física y astronomía nos dijo que el eclipse no será el “más peligroso” y que se espera que sea como cualquier otro.
Así que calificamos esta declaración como Falsa.
Lee más reportes de PolitiFact en Español aquí.
Debido a limitaciones técnicas, partes de nuestra página web aparecen en inglés. Estamos trabajando en mejorar la presentación.
After a critical bridge collapsed in Baltimore, some social media users claimed Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg was pinning the incident on a systemic cause: racism.
“Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg is taking zero blame for the accident today that occurred in Baltimore at the Francis Scott Key Bridge,” the March 26 X post read. “Instead, he is blaming those that constructed the bridge saying it was designed with racism, just like racist bridges in New York.”
The post included a video clip of Buttigieg saying, “If an underpass was constructed such that a bus carrying mostly Black and Puerto Rican kids to a beach, or it would have been, in New York, was designed too low for it to pass by, but that obviously reflects racism that went into those design choices.”
(Screenshot from X)
We also saw variations of the claim on TikTok and Instagram.
This is a real quote from Buttigieg, but he didn’t say that March 26 after a container vessel crashed into the Francis Scott Key Bridge and caused the structure’s collapse. He said it during a White House briefing in November 2021.
In remarks hours after the Baltimore bridge’s collapse, Buttigieg did not mention racism.
“This is a unique circumstance. I do not know of a bridge that has been constructed to withstand a direct impact from a vessel of this size,” he said. The vessel that struck the bridge was about 984 feet long and weighed 95,000 gross tons. It was moving at about 8 knots or around 9 miles per hour.
Buttigieg deferred to the National Transportation Safety Board’s independent investigation for questions about how the crash happened. We found no reports or statements that show he cited racism as the incident’s cause.
On March 27, at a White House briefing, Buttigieg said, “It’s too early to speculate, of course, what NTSB will find. … What we do know is a bridge like this one, completed in the 1970s, was simply not made to withstand a direct impact on a critical support pier from a vessel that weighs about 200 million pounds, orders of magnitude bigger than cargo ships that were in service in that region at the time that the bridge was first built.”
Buttigieg said this collapse was unlike others because of design flaws in the bridge. He said, “What I will note is that some of the other bridge collapses that were of these proportions, notably the Minnesota bridge collapse, happened because of a design flaw and the bridge spontaneously collapsed. This is, of course, not that. This was the result of an impact.”
We previously fact-checked Buttigieg on his claim that racism is “physically built into some of our highways,” and found it True. Experts on highways and urban history widely agreed with his assertion.
We rate the claim that Buttigieg blamed the Francis Scott Key Bridge collapse on racism False.
RELATED:Officials still investigating why cargo ship lost power before Baltimore bridge crash
Echoing a Republican talking point, Sen. J.D. Vance, R-Ohio, claimed that all jobs created during the Biden administration have gone to foreign-born workers and that illegal immigration was leading to the “decimation of the American middle class.”
Vance said that during a March 14 interview on Fox News’ “Jesse Watters Primetime.” Watters prefaced the conversation saying that Tyson Foods was laying off employees in Perry, Iowa, and hiring asylum seekers recruited in New York.
Vance said he didn’t know the details of the Tyson matter, but that illegal immigration reduced American workers’ wages “by replacing American citizens with foreign laborers who are willing to work at slave wages.”
Toward the end of the interview, Vance compared jobs and hiring patterns under former President Donald Trump and under President Joe Biden:
“If you go back to the Trump economy, you had American jobs going to American workers. You had wages rising,” Vance said. “Under the Biden economy, you have those American workers getting fired and replaced with foreign labor. This is not an exaggeration. All net job creation — you heard me right, 100% of net job creation under the Biden administration — has gone to the foreign-born.”
Is Vance right that all net job creation under Biden has only benefited foreign-born workers?
Luke Schroeder, a Vance spokesperson, told PolitiFact that Vance’s statement on Fox News “is fully supported by government data and analysis from leading nonpartisan think tanks. The impacts of Joe Biden’s immigration policies are clear: fewer jobs for American citizens and more jobs for the foreign born.”
As evidence, Schroeder pointed to a study by the Center for Immigration Studies, which favors lower immigration. The study found that there were 183,000 fewer native-born workers employed in the fourth quarter of 2023 than in the fourth quarter of 2019.
However, the study’s starting point is before Biden’s presidency began. Vance’s claim also omits that unemployment for native-born workers is low by historical standards and that 5.7 million jobs have gone to native-born workers from February 2021, Biden’s first full month in office, to February 2024.
A growing foreign-born workforce
The foreign-born labor force is relatively small — in 2023, foreign-born workers accounted for just under 20% of all workers. The foreign-born workforce include people who are in the U.S. legally, including people who have become U.S. citizens.
The employment of foreign-born workers has been growing for years, especially since the pandemic in 2020.
By 2022, foreign-born workers’ share of the labor force reversed all of its pandemic-era decline and then began exceeding its pre-pandemic level, calculations by Evgeniya A. Duzhak, a regional policy economist with the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco, showed. This is projected to help the economy grow by about $7 trillion over the next decade, according to the Congressional Budget Office.
“Something important is going on, and it’s very hard in real time to figure it out,” said Douglas Holtz-Eakin, president of the center-right American Action Forum.
During Biden’s presidency, job growth among foreign-born workers has increased at a faster rate than the hiring of native-born workers.
Overall growth in the foreign-born population is likely driving its faster employment growth, said Gary Burtless, an economist with the Brookings Institution, a Washington, D.C., think tank.
Recent migrants — some of whom can qualify for work permits after six months as they await asylum decisions — are in their prime working years (20s to 50s). By contrast, many native-born Americans belong to the baby boom generation (in their 60s and 70s), and more of them are retiring every year.
There’s also a long-standing pattern of foreign-born workers participating in the workforce at higher rates than native-born Americans. The gap has widened slightly in the past few years.
However, it’s hard to know how much of this gap comes from voluntary reasons (such as parenting, returning to school or retiring), or from being outcompeted for jobs by immigrants.
Vance’s evidence includes employment data pre-Biden presidency
Vance’s evidence, the Center for Immigration Studies’ analysis, compared employment in the fourth quarter 2019 with the fourth quarter 2023. The fourth quarter covers October, November and December.
The study found that 183,000 fewer native-born workers were employed in 2023 compared with 2019. In contrast, almost 2.9 million more foreign-born workers were employed in 2023 than in 2019.
But in the first year covered by the study, Biden “had no influence whatsoever over foreign migration into the U.S. or over the division of employment gains between the foreign-born and the native-born,” Burtless said. “If we want to assign responsibility for the trends described in the report, the trends were crucially determined by a president named Trump, not Biden.”
Although Vance sought to tie Biden’s immigration policies to the gains in foreign-born employment, the data does not distinguish between recent migrants and immigrants who have been here for decades before Biden became president.
A different cut of the federal data counters Vance’s claim
The federal Bureau of Labor Statistics reports the employment levels for native-born and foreign-born people. This is where the Center for Immigration Studies got its numbers, but we looked at what the figures showed for Biden’s tenure only.
These statistics emerge from the same monthly survey that asks households about who is working, who is unemployed but looking for work and who is not currently looking for work. This survey is best known for producing the widely tracked unemployment rate, but it comes with caveats.
Economists consider the household survey data inferior to the one from a different federal survey that asks businesses about the workers they employ, partly because the household survey is much smaller than the businesses survey and thus has a higher margin of error. It also isn’t adjusted for regular seasonal variations, so the data can bounce frequently.
But because the household survey is the only one that asks whether the worker is native-born or foreign-born, it’s the only way to compare patterns between these two groups.
We examined data starting in February 2021, the first full month of Biden’s presidency. And because the household survey data is not seasonally adjusted, the best way to measure from year to year is to look at the same month across different years. So, we compared February 2021 with February 2024, the most recent month for which data is available.
During that period, the native-born employment rose by almost 5.7 million workers, not zero, as Vance said on Fox News. That was a larger increase than the 5.1 million for foreign-born workers. By this metric, about 47% of jobs created during Biden’s presidency went to foreign-born workers, not 100% as Vance said.
The unemployment rate is higher for foreign-born workers than for native-born workers
Economists said that if large numbers of native-born Americans were losing their jobs to foreign-born workers, it would show up in the unemployment rate. But it doesn’t.
In four of the last five months, foreign-born workers had higher unemployment rates than native-born workers.
In February 2024, the unemployment rate for native-born workers was 4%, which is low by historical standards and equal to the pre-pandemic average under Trump. The average rate during Biden’s tenure has been only slightly higher: 4.2%.
The Center for Immigration Studies report noted that the labor force participation rate for native-born Americans has fallen since 2019’s fourth quarter. But the report also found that this rate has been falling since 2000 and slowed from 2019 to 2023.
Our ruling
Vance said, “100% of net job creation under the Biden administration — has gone to the foreign born.”
Foreign-born employment has been increasing for years, and employment growth among foreign-born workers has risen particularly fast since the pandemic. However, the data Vance points to doesn’t fully align with Biden’s presidency.
Vance pointed to a study that showed 183,000 fewer native-born workers in the fourth quarter of 2023 compared with the fourth quarter of 2019, while foreign-born employment rose by almost 2.9 million over the same period.
This growth in foreign-born workers includes recent migrants and foreign-born workers who have been U.S. citizens or lawful permanent residents for decades, long before Biden became president.
From Biden’s first full month in office in February 2021 to February 2024, the number of native-born workers increased by 5.7 million. That was over half of all jobs created in that period.
The attack on a concert hall outside Moscow that left Russia reeling has sparked conspiracy theories and false claims online, some of which blamed the United States as the culprit.
The March 22 attack was the deadliest terror act in Russia in two decades, leaving more than 140 people dead and dozens injured.
A branch of the Islamic State terrorist group said it carried out the attack. U.S. and western intelligence officials have said they believe the Islamic State’s claim is credible.
Russian President Vladimir Putin and Alexander Bortnikov, head of Russia’s Federal Security Service, have tried to tie the attack to U.S., Ukraine and western allies, without evidence. Ukrainian officials have denied involvement.
“We know the crime was committed by the hands of radical Islamists,” Putin said. “We want to know who ordered it.”
Some social media posts have echoed suspicions of U.S. involvement, citing an official warning about a possible terrorist incident about two weeks before the concert hall attack.
One viral X post said, “The US has issued the warning on March 7th. The US knew about it because they are behind this gruesome terror attack on Russian civilians.”
The March 7 security alert, published by the U.S. Embassy in Russia, is not evidence that the U.S. was involved in the attack. The U.S. was following a long-standing policy to warn other countries, even ones that are adversaries, that U.S. intelligence had found signs of an impending attack on civilians.
Other social media posts blaming the U.S. cited remarks by John Kirby, the White House National Security Council’s spokesperson. The posts claim the video is of Kirby warning about the attack earlier this month. “These lies only make them look guilty,” one post on X said.
The video is a spliced version of remarks Kirby gave March 22 at the White House press briefing, which came shortly after the Moscow attack.
The video doesn’t show his preceding statements: “First, before I go through what I had prepared to talk about, obviously, we’ve all seen the reports and the video coming out of Moscow…I mean, this was all just breaking before I came on out here.”
What did the warning say?
The U.S. embassy’s March 7 warning cautioned people to avoid large crowds over a two-day period.
“The Embassy is monitoring reports that extremists have imminent plans to target large gatherings in Moscow, to include concerts, and U.S. citizens should be advised to avoid large gatherings over the next 48 hours,” the alert on the embassy’s website said.
The warning was passed on to Russian authorities under an existing “duty to warn” policy.
Putin dismissed the U.S. warning three days before the attack, saying it was a plot to “intimidate and destabilize our society.”
What is the history of ‘duty to warn’ policies?
The U.S. policy was formalized in July 2015 under James Clapper, then the director of national intelligence.
“The duty to warn policy provides a requirement that U.S. intelligence agencies share credible intelligence they collect about threats of violence against innocent persons,” Cortney Weinbaum, senior national security researcher at the Rand Corp., a nonpartisan think tank, told PolitiFact. “When the U.S. exerts this authority, it will often share the intelligence assessment without revealing any sensitive sources or methods.”
The decision to share such information is up to every country; there is no “rule or principle of international law that requires a warning,” said Geoffrey S. Corn, director of the Center for Military Law and Policy at Texas Tech University School of Law.
So, why would a country share such information? The duty to warn “demonstrates that the United States takes no pleasure in the suffering of innocents, even when they are part of a nation that is considered an adversary,” said Paul R. Pillar of the Center for Security Studies at Georgetown University. “It shows the United States uses its resources to combat all terrorism, not just terrorism targeted at its own national interests.”
The U.S. is not the only country with a policy like this, experts said. Egyptian officials warned Israel about Hamas’ Oct. 7 attacks days before it happened, according to Rep. Michael McCaul, R-Texas, the chairman of the U.S. House Foreign Affairs Committee. (Israel denies receiving any such warning.)
The policy does not limit the sharing of credible threats to U.S. allies.
Besides the warning shared with Russia, the U.S. had warned Iran about the Jan. 3 bombing that killed more than 90 people in Kerman, a city south of Tehran. The same Islamic State branch that carried out the Moscow shootings claimed responsibility for that attack.
The warnings go both ways
The U.S. has received similar warnings, too, including from Russia.
In 2011, Russian intelligence warned the U.S. government twice about the terrorist links to the Tsarnaev brothers, who bombed the Boston Marathon in 2013, according to a 2014 inspectors general report.
Experts said it is up to the host countries to act on such warnings; in the incidents in Russia and Iran, those countries do not appear to have acted, or at least not acted enough to prevent the attack.
“For Iran and Russia, it is possible that both countries did not trust the U.S. or did not want to believe that such an attack was feasible,” Weinbaum said. “Often when intelligence is accurate, acted on, and leads to a favorable result, the public will never know about it,” she added.
The U.S. was also slow in the Boston Marathon case. The inspectors general report after that attack recommended that “the FBI consider sharing threat information with state and local partners more proactively.”
Our ruling
An X post said a warning from the U.S. embassy in Russia proves the U.S. was behind the “gruesome terrorist attack on Russian civilians.”
The Islamic State terrorist group has claimed responsibility for the deadly attack in Russia.
The advance warning from the U.S. is not evidence that the U.S. was behind the attack. It was part of a “duty to warn” policy to warn other countries, even adversaries, if U.S. intelligence uncovers evidence of a pending terrorist plot targeting civilians.
As investigators tried to determine why a container ship crashed into Baltimore’s Francis Scott Key Bridge, social media users shared baseless speculation about the cause. The collapse left six people presumed dead and closed one of the nation’s busiest ports.
Across social media platforms, people gave a variety of explanations for why the ship lost power and steered into the bridge.
Here are some of the claims PolitiFact has debunked so far:
There’s no evidence of ‘false flags’ or a cyberattack
It’s common after tragic national news for social media users with mixed motives to flock online and assert the event was intentional or staged to distract people from important issues.
The Baltimore bridge collapse is no different. One social media user said the collapse was a false flag to divert attention from the raid of music mogul Sean “Diddy” Combs’ properties as part of a sex trafficking investigation. Online influencer Andrew Tate said that the ship was the target of a cyberattack that caused it to lose power and steer into the bridge.
Both claims lack evidence. Maryland state and federal authorities said there’s no reason to believe the ship crashing into the bridge was intentional.
No, Wikipedia entry doesn’t prove Israel directed the bridge collapse
An X post showed what appeared to be a Wikipedia page entry about the Baltimore bridge collapse that said, “After the US abstained from the ceasefire resolution for Gaza, the Israelis deployed their Talmudic network to take down the bridge.”
Anyone can edit a Wikipedia page, so even if that entry was real, it’s not proof that Israel directed an attack on the bridge.
Andrea Chao, Sen. Mitch McConnell, R-Ky.’s late sister-in-law, wasn’t CEO of the company that owned the ship
Chao, who drowned in February after accidentally backing her Tesla into a Texas pond, was the CEO of Foremost Group, her family’s shipping company. But her company didn’t own the Dali, the Singapore-based vessel that struck the Baltimore bridge.
Grace Ocean Private Ltd. owns the Dali, and Synergy Marine Group manages the ship. Chao had no connection to either company.
(Instagram screenshot)
Video doesn’t show explosions on the Baltimore bridge. It’s from a 2022 Crimea explosion
An Instagram video showed a real video of the Baltimore bridge collapsing but claimed that explosions brought it down. The video then purported to show the bridge from a different angle before a fiery explosion happened. The bridge explosion seen in the video came from 2022 footage on the Kerch bridge that connected Russia to Crimea.
Buttigieg didn’t blame the bridge collapse on racism
X, Instagram and TikTok users took U.S. Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg’s 2021 comments about racism in infrastructure design choices out of context, making it look as though he blamed the Baltimore bridge accident on racism to avoid accountability.
Netflix trailer for Leave the World Behind.
Netflix film didn’t predict Baltimore bridge accident
The 2023 Netflix movie “Leave the World Behind,” which lists former President Barack Obama and first lady Michelle Obama as executive producers and is based on a 2021 novel, is about two families vacationing in Long Island, New York, who are trying to survive a mysterious cyberattack that caused a communication blackout.
In one scene, a large cargo ship runs aground on a beach full of people, not into a bridge.
Although there are visual similarities between the movie’s images and photos of the Baltimore scene, the movie’s story is fictional. In real life, authorities investigating the crash so far believe it was an accident.
Captain of Dali ship wasn’t a Ukrainian national
Social media claims that an unnamed Ukrainian national was the captain of the cargo ship that struck the Baltimore bridge are inaccurate. The Dali had a crew of 22 Indian nationals on board, said a spokesperson for the company that manages the ship.
PolitiFact Staff Writers Grace Abels, Madison Czopek, Sara Swann and Loreben Tuquero contributed to this report.
Para leer en español, vea esta traducción de Google Translate.
In announcing his choice for vice president, independent presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and his running mate, Nicole Shanahan, made statements that were false or misleading:
There’s no evidence that vaccines cause autism, contrary to the impression Shanahan left in questioning the safety of “one shot on top of another shot … throughout the course of childhood” just before citing an increase in the prevalence of autism.
Kennedy wrongly blamed President Joe Biden for shutting down businesses in response to the pandemic in 2020, when Biden wasn’t in office, and misleadingly claimed there was no scientific basis for closing businesses during the pandemic.
Kennedy faulted former President Donald Trump’s and Biden’s pandemic policies for transferring “$4 trillion from the middle class” to “500 new billionaires.” But an Oxfam report that found 573 new global billionaires during the pandemic didn’t attribute the increase to U.S. policies alone.
Shanahan, 38, would not be “the youngest vice president in American history,” as she claimed. That would still be John C. Breckinridge.
Kennedy, an environmental lawyer and son of former Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy, made his announcement in Oakland, California, where Shanahan, a lawyer, was born.
Autism
Shanahan left the misleading impression that childhood vaccines contributed to an increase in autism prevalence.
As we’ve written before, there’s no evidence that vaccines cause autism, and the topic has been studied extensively.
Independent presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. announced Nicole Shanahan, an attorney, tech entrepreneur and philanthropist, as his vice presidential running mate during an event in Oakland, California, on March 26. Photo by Tayfun Coskun/Anadolu via Getty Images.
“Conditions like autism used to be 1 in 10,000. Now here in the state of California, it is 1 in 22. 1 in 22 children affected,” Shanahan said.
Just before that comment, she said “pharmaceutical medicine” was one of “three main causes” of an “epidemic of chronic disease,” adding that “no single safety study can assess the cumulative impact of one prescription on top of another prescription and one shot on top of another shot on top of another shot throughout the course of childhood.” (The other two causes of the “epidemic” that Shanahan cited are “toxic substances in our environment” and “electromagnetic pollution.”)
Her remarks ignored the main reasons for the rise in autism prevalence, and they left the impression that childhood vaccines are a cause — a debunked idea that Kennedy has repeatedly pushed for years.
The prevalence of children identified as having autism has increased significantly over the past several decades. But, while there may be some true increase in autism, the major reasons for the rise are increased awareness of the disorder and changes in how it is defined and diagnosed, as we’ve explained in previous articles.
Shanahan’s statistics are largely correct. The latest data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention show a 1 in 22 rate of autism in children in California. In Maryland, the rate was 1 in 43. “These variations could be due to how communities are identifying children with autism,” the CDC wrote in a March 2023 press release on the figures.
The earliest studies on prevalence found rates close to what Shanahan cited. “The first studies of the prevalence of autism, which were conducted in the 1960s and 1970s in Europe and the United States, reported prevalence estimates in the range of 2 to 4 cases per 10,000 children,” the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine wrote in a 2015 publication. “This led to the impression that autism was a rare childhood disorder.”
The publication goes on to cite “the expansion of diagnostic criteria and the adoption of the concept of autism as a spectrum of impairments” as likely the major reason for an increase in prevalence in subsequent decades. It also cited “improvements in screening and services for children.”
As we’ve also explained before, in a story debunking Kennedy’s false and misleading assertions about autism, there are some known factors that have likely led to a slight true increase in autism, including a rise in births to older parents and in infants with birth complications who survive.
And an increased risk of autism also has been associated with genetics, prenatal exposure to air pollution or pesticides, as well as certain maternal health conditions.
However, there’s no evidence childhood vaccines are linked to the neurodevelopmental disorder, and scientists have studied the issue extensively, looking into multiple suggested components and vaccine types.
David Mandell, a psychiatric epidemiologist, health services researcher and director of the Center for Mental Health at the University of Pennsylvania, told us for our prior story, “Every single rigorous study we have” shows “no association” between autism and vaccination.
The Pandemic and Billionaires
Kennedy also claimed that Trump’s and Biden’s policies during the pandemic resulted in a large transfer of wealth to hundreds of new billionaires.
“Those policies that both of them engineered transferred $4 trillion from the middle class to this new oligarchy of billionaires,” he said. “They created 500 new billionaires in 500 days. A billionaire a day.”
We asked Kennedy’s campaign for the source of his figures, but we have not received a response. We previously wrote about a similar claim he made last July, and his campaign did not provide supporting evidence then, either.
In our August article, we wrote that Kennedy could be referring to a 2022 Oxfam analysis, which found a $3.8 trillion increase in the net worth of billionaires worldwide during the pandemic. At the time, the number of billionaires had increased to 2,668 — up by 573 from when the pandemic began in early 2020, the analysis said.
However, neither figure was specific to the U.S. or solely attributed to its policies.
Oxfam did say that in some cases, spending by the U.S. government during the pandemic helped create billionaires, such as by providing public funding to Moderna, which collected large profits from its COVID-19 vaccine.
But Oxfam also said that billionaire wealth increased substantially when “central banks injected trillions of dollars into economies worldwide, aiming to keep the world economy afloat.” And it noted that during the pandemic, there was a “profits bonanza in the food, energy, pharmaceutical, and technology sectors,” which increased the wealth of billionaires who owned large shares of companies in those industries.
We also wrote that Kennedy may have been referring to an approximate figure for federal spending authorized in response to the pandemic, which totaled $4.6 trillion as of Jan. 31, 2023, according to the Government Accountability Office. But much of that federal spending was for programs designed to aid lower- and middle-class people, including economic impact payments, unemployment insurance and supplemental food assistance.
COVID-19 Business Closures
Kennedy, a prominent critic of the COVID-19 vaccines, wrongly blamed Biden for shutting down businesses in response to the pandemic in 2020, when Biden wasn’t in office, and misleadingly claimed there was no scientific basis for closing businesses during the pandemic.
Kennedy, March 26: Those two men, during their terms as president, both worked to close our main street businesses for a year — 3.3 million businesses with no due process, no scientific citation, no public hearings, no environmental impact statement. They just told us to shut them down.
It appears that Kennedy is referencing an August 2020 economic study by Robert Fairlie, an economics professor at the University of California, Santa Cruz, that gauged the “early-stage effects of COVID-19 on small business owners.” In his study, Fairlie, who is now at UCLA, said the number of working small-business owners fell by 3.3 million, from 15 million in February 2020 to 11.7 million in April 2020, “because of COVID‐19 mandates and health‐ and economic‐driven demand shifts.” That represented a 22% decline — “the largest drop on record,” the report said.
Soon after, there was a “partial rebound,” Fairlie wrote. By June 2020, there were 13.8 million active business owners — a decline of 1.2 million, or 8%, from February 2020. (See table 1.)
Kennedy blames both Trump and Biden for the immediate economic fallout from a global pandemic. But Biden wasn’t in office at the time, and Trump, as president, didn’t have the power to shut down businesses.
On March 16, 2020, Trump announced guidelines to slow the spread of the coronavirus, but they didn’t include mandates to close businesses. The guidelines called on Americans to stay at home if they feel sick, have a household member who tests positive, or are older or have a serious health condition. The administration also recommended not gathering in groups of 10 people or more, and avoiding bars and restaurants.
A week into the “15 Days to Slow the Spread” campaign, Trump was already expressing concern about the economic impact of the pandemic. Soon he sought to reverse course entirely.
“We have to get back to work,” Trump said at a Fox News virtual town hall on March 24, 2020. Despite Trump’s concerns, the White House extended its “slow the spread” recommendations to April 30, 2020.
At the time, there were no vaccines or therapeutics to prevent, mitigate or treat COVID-19. In response, state leaders — not the federal government — imposed mandates on businesses.
Although Kennedy suggests there was no scientific basis to shut down businesses, peer-reviewed studies later found that government restrictions early in the pandemic reduced COVID-19 cases and/or mortality.
In a study published by The Review of Financial Studies in June 2021, Yale School of Management researchers developed “a time-series database” on several types of restrictions for every U.S. county from March to December 2020. The authors said they found “strong evidence consistent with the idea that employee mask policies, mask mandates for the general population, restaurant and bar closures, gym closures, and high-risk business closures reduce future fatality growth.”
The business closures did not come without a cost.
The Yale researchers also found some business closures “may have been counterproductive,” saying “second-round closures of low- to medium-risk businesses and personal care/spa services, did not generate consistent evidence of lowered fatality growth.”
Another study, led by University of Michigan researchers and published in January 2022 in PLOS ONE, concluded that “the number of lives saved by the spring-summer lockdowns and other COVID-19-mitigation was greater than the number of lives potentially lost due to the economic downturn.”
According to the study’s estimates, the mitigation measures in the first six months of the pandemic saved 866,350 to 1,711,150 lives, while deaths “attributable to the economic downturn” were between 57,922 and 245,055.
There have been nearly 1.2 million COVID-19 deaths in the U.S. since January 2020, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Youngest Vice Presidents
Finally, Shanahan, who is currently 38, wrongly claimed that she would make history as the youngest U.S. vice president, if elected.
“People talk about my age. It’s true. I will be the youngest vice president in American history,” she said.
Nope. John C. Breckinridge would still be the youngest; he was 36 when he became President James Buchanan’s vice president in March 1857.
If the Kennedy-Shanahan ticket wins in November, Shanahan would be 39 on Inauguration Day in January 2025. That would make her the second youngest vice president.
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Officials briefed on the Francis Scott Key Bridge collapse say there’s no credible evidence the container ship’s collision with the bridge’s support column was a terrorist attack or an intentional act.
But that hasn’t stopped social media users from questioning who was in charge of the ship when the incident happened.
“You won’t believe who is the captain of the ship that collapsed the bridge in Baltimore,” an X user wrote March 26 in a post that contained punctuation errors. “The captain of the container ship Dali, who demolished the bridge today. Francis Scott, is a Ukrainian.”
The post included a screenshot of a website showing information about a 52-year-old man whose name began with the letters “Se.” The rest of the name is obscured. Ukraine was listed as the unknown person’s citizenship and nationality. The information also said the man had “experience on container ships.”
(Screenshot from X.)
But claims that this anonymous Ukrainian was in charge of the container ship that hit the bridge March 26 are inaccurate.
That container ship was a Signaporean-flagged vessel called Dali that is managed by Synergy Marine Group. The ship was leaving Baltimore and heading to Colombo, Sri Lanka, with a 22-person crew, according to Synergy Marine Group.
Singapore’s Maritime Port Authority, which is investigating the collision, also said there were 22 crew members on board the Dali.
The captain’s identity has not been released, but we found no evidence to support claims that he was from Ukraine. The Dali’s crew was from India.
“I can confirm, all 22 crew members onboard the ship were Indian nationals,” said Darrell Wilson, a spokesperson for Synergy Marine Group.
The company also confirmed that although a minor injury had been reported, all members of the crew were safe as of March 27.
False claims about the captain’s nationality stemmed from information people found on the website BalticShipping.com.
The image shared in the X post was a screenshot from the website. People who searched for information about the Dali on BalticShipping.com appeared to have scrutinized the previous “seafarers” who’d worked on the vessel. One of those previous crew members was Ukrainian.
Shayan Sardarizadeh, a BBC journalist, said in a March 26 X post that “online records show a Ukrainian man was the Dali’s captain from March to July 2016.”
We were unable to independently verify this, because the Ukrainian man’s information no longer appears under the “worked on” tab on Dali’s BalticShipping.com page.
The change prompted some commenters to write that “they deleted that the ship was operated by a Ukrainian” and claim that they could “smell a cover-up.”
But other commenters rebutted the claims: To all the people commenting about a Ukrainian captain, one wrote, “when his profile was available on (the) web page, you could download his CV where you’d see that his last contract on Dali was way back in 2016.”
Sardarizadeh, who covers disinformation, said this false narrative had been pushed by “pro-Kremlin influencers.” The person who made the post on X that we’re fact-checking describes himself as “a Russian internet communicator, blogger.”
At the time of the collision with the bridge, the ship was also being directed by local pilots. There were two pilots, according to news reports — one with more than 10 years of experience and an apprentice who’d started his training in February. Their nationality is unknown.
Wilson explained that pilots are local experts who know the area and harbor and guide commercial ships in and out.
“The Pilot is the chief person, duly qualified, to navigate ships into or out of a harbor or through certain difficult waters,” reads the Association of Maryland Pilots’ website. “The Pilot’s familiarity with the water that is being traversed allows the ship to be safely navigated to its port.”
Foreign-flagged ships like the Dali are required to have local pilots to guide them in and out of U.S. ports, The Washington Post reported.
We reached out to the Association of Maryland Pilots and the American Pilots’ Association but received no response.
Our ruling
An X post claimed the captain of the container ship Dali that hit the Francis Scott Key Bridge check “is a Ukrainian.”
The ship had a crew of 22 Indian nationals, according to a spokesperson for the company that manages the vessel. Two local pilots, one with 10 years of experience and a new apprentice, were also helping direct the ship out of the port when it collided with the bridge.
We found no evidence the captain on board that night was Ukrainian, so we rate these claims False.
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