Category: Fact Check

President Joe Biden’s allies are countering claims that his age is hurting his ability to govern. Sen. Chris Murphy said the president’s acuity helped create a law that cut deadly gun violence.

“I worked with (Biden) on the bipartisan gun bill. He was involved in every step of that process,” Murphy, D-Conn., said Feb. 11 on CBS’ “Face the Nation.” “And what has happened since we passed that bill? A 12% reduction in urban homicides in this country.” 

Murphy is referring to the Bipartisan Safer Communities Act that Biden signed into law in June 2022 after mass shootings in Buffalo, New York, and Uvalde, Texas. The legislation combined gun safety provisions with mental health and school security resources and marked the first gun control measure from Congress in nearly three decades.

Murphy’s press office pointed us to homicide statistics that largely match his figures. It also cited a speech Murphy gave on the House floor in which he repeated the number and said that there had been a 10% reduction in gun injuries and deaths in the last year, thanks to the law.

Criminologists and gun policy experts confirmed that U.S. homicides have dropped 10% to 12% over the last year — the lion’s share of them from guns. But the decline represents a reduction from big spikes in violent crime at the COVID-19 pandemic’s apex and experts told us that change likely relates several factors, not one law alone. 

Violent crime is down from pandemic-era peak

The FBI won’t release its 2023 national crime statistics until the fall, but experts said preliminary data matches up with Murphy’s statistic. “Urban” homicides, as he put it, are homicides committed in densely populated cities where crime is typically more concentrated. 

Jeff Asher, a crime data analyst and co-founder of AH Datalytics, estimated that homicides in 2023 were down around 12% compared with 2022 in 211 cities with available data. Seventy-one percent of the cities evaluated saw a decline. If the projected decline bears out in the FBI data, Asher said, it would represent one of the largest — if not the largest — single-year homicide drop since U.S. crime recordkeeping began.

Murphy referred to the Bipartisan Safer Communities Act as a “gun” bill, and although his statistic covered all urban homicides, the vast majority of homicides in the U.S. involve firearms — about 81% in 2021, according to Pew Research Center. 

The Gun Violence Archive, an independent nonprofit, estimated that deaths and injuries from gun violence declined 8% to 10% in 2023 compared with 2022.

Asher also said that a drop in homicides overall generally represents a comparable drop in gun homicides. 

“Guns account for 80-90% of murders in most cities and 77% nationally in 2022, so most of the changes in murder levels are attributable to changes in gun violence,” he wrote in an email. “I’d guess that whatever percent decline we see in 2023 was almost exclusively driven by guns. In New Orleans, for example, there were 65 fewer fatal shooting incidents in 2023 than 2022 and one less non-gun homicide incident.”

In its 2023 analysis, the Council on Criminal Justice, a nonpartisan think tank, found that the number of homicides in the 32 cities it studied was 10% lower than the previous year. The decline follows the group’s 2022 analysis, which found that homicide counts for that year were 4% lower than in 2021. 

These declines come with a huge caveat: They represent drops from big COVID-19-era violent crime spikes in 2020 and 2021. Overall, preliminary data shows the United States’ 2023 homicide rate is expected to be about 18% higher than it was in 2019.

What the Bipartisan Safer Communities Act did

The Bipartisan Safer Communities Act provided $750 million to help states implement crisis intervention programs and “red flag laws” designed to help temporarily take firearms from people if they pose a danger to themselves or others. The act also closed domestic violence loopholes, improved background checks, made gun trafficking illegal and outlawed what is known as “straw purchases,” when someone buys a gun on someone else’s behalf. It also increased funding for mental health and school safety services.

Because of the legislation, the Justice Department has so far brought gun trafficking charges against more than 200 people, The Washington Post reported in December; about 80 were charged with violating the law’s straw purchase provision. The law has also led to law enforcement seizing more than 1,300 guns from suspected gun traffickers between mid-July 2022 and late October 2023, according to a report by Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand, D-N.Y.

President Joe Biden has also touted the law’s impact in a Jan. 4 press release, saying the enhanced background checks enacted by the legislation led to the denial of “more than 500 illegal gun purchases by people under 21 years old.”

Several factors likely contributed to the decline, experts say

Criminologists and data analysts told us that pinpointing the precise reasons national crime data changes is challenging at best and impossible at worst. The Bipartisan Safer Communities Act likely helped drive down the numbers, they said, but should not be credited as the predominant driver. 

“There are many theories about what is driving these changes, but I have not seen research that explains them convincingly, and I have seen no research, convincing or otherwise, that has attempted to estimate the effect of the Bipartisan Safer Communities Act on 2023 urban homicides,” Andrew Morral, senior behavioral scientist at the Rand Corp., a nonpartisan think tank, and director of the National Collaborative on Gun Violence Research, told PolitiFact. 

“Could it have had the effect of reducing urban homicides? Yes,” Morral wrote in an email. “Are there other factors likely influencing recent declines in homicide rates? Very likely.”

Criminologists said the declines in the last two years likely relate to a confluence of factors, including the fading tensions surrounding George Floyd’s murder by police and the easing of the pandemic’s social disruptions, restrictions and anxieties. Cities also aggressively undertook urgent violence-reduction strategies to respond to homicide spikes, experts said. 

Experts also noted that the decline in homicides is uneven throughout the country, and some cities have experienced more homicides, not less.

Alex Piquero, a criminology professor at the University of Miami and former director of the Bureau of Justice Statistics, pointed to what he described as “staggering increases” in 2023 homicides in Washington, D.C., Memphis, Tennessee, and Oakland, California.

“If this law is causing gun homicides to come down, then what happened in these cities? If national legislation is causing the decline, it should be doing it everywhere but it’s not, Piquero said. “Could what those monies were used for have influenced some of the trends? Maybe, but it’s virtually impossible to measure a national aggregate change and some law and how it deals with things at the local level.”

Still, the law’s advocates contend that it enables the federal government to identify and charge the most violent offenders, thereby supporting local law enforcement efforts to reduce homicides.

Our ruling

Murphy said the Bipartisan Safer in Communities Act led to 12% reduction in urban homicides in 2023.

Preliminary data shows urban homicides across the country decreased about 12% in 2023 compared with a year earlier.

But that data ignores that this one-year decline came after violent crime spiked during the COVID-19 pandemic. Overall, preliminary data shows the United States’ 2023 homicide rate is expected to be about 18% higher than it was in 2019, pre-pandemic.

Criminologists said the law likely helped drive down the figures in 2023, but they added that the  drop likely relates to a confluence of factors, including the easing of the pandemic’s social disruptions and the way cities responded to homicide spikes.

Murphy’s claim is partly accurate but leaves out important information. We rate it Half True.

RELATED: Ask PolitiFact: What does the data show on deadly shootings by 18-to-20-year-olds? 

RELATED: Congress passes historic bipartisan gun legislation: Bipartisan Safer Communities Act

Not everyone who showed up to greet President Joe Biden in Allentown, Pennsylvania, in January was pleased to see him. But a deceptively edited video shared on social media made it sound like the crowd was overwhelmingly aggressive and insulting. 

The Instagram video showed Biden walking into a bike shop as protestors loudly chanted, “F— Joe Biden.” Text over the video read, “Joe’s warm welcome to Allentown, Pa.” 

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.)

The Daily Mail shared the same video on its website with a caption misspelling “Allentown” that said, “US president Joe Biden was met with cheers, boos, and one man shouting ‘loser!’ on his visit to stores in Allenstown, Pennsylvania to tout economic progress.”

The video’s audio is different from the one in the Instagram video. Some in the crowd cheered as Biden walked into the shop. One person yelled, “Loser!” But no one shouted the expletive-laced chant. 

Forbes Breaking News shared the unedited video on its YouTube channel with the title, “JUST IN: Man Yells ‘Loser!’ at Biden During His Visit To Allentown, Pennsylvania.” 

A Jan. 12 New York Post article about the incident said that one person shouted, “Go home, Joe!” and the Daily Mail reported that protestors calling for a ceasefire in Gaza lined up by Biden’s motorcade in Allentown and called him “genocide Joe.” 

But they did not chant the “F” word at him, so we rate the claim that protestors yelled “F— Joe Biden” as the president arrived in Allentown, Pennsylvania, False. 

In an ad timed for Black History Month, President Joe Biden touted gains Black Americans made during his tenure.

The Feb. 13 advertisement said,: “The lowest Black unemployment rate in history. Black child poverty cut in half. Record numbers of new Black entrepreneurs. And over $130 billion in student debt forgiven.”

We’ve rated a few of those claims Mostly True: The record low for Black unemployment was reached in April 2023 and Black child poverty hit a record low of 22.3% in 2022. The Biden administration has also announced student debt forgiveness totaling $136 billion. While the student loan forgiveness efforts do not have racial guidelines, about 85% of Black undergrads finish college with student debt, compared with 69% of whites, so Black loan recipients benefit significantly from debt forgiveness efforts.

What about “record numbers of new Black entrepreneurs”? Biden has made similar comments  a few times recently, including in campaign speeches Jan. 27 in South Carolina and Feb. 4 in Las Vegas.

Data supports the claim that the prevalence of Black-owned small businesses has reached record levels under Biden, based on available data since 1989. 

What the data shows

According to a Brookings Institution analysis of the U.S. Census Bureau’s Annual Business Survey, the number of Black-owned businesses with more than one employee has increased every year since 2017. The biggest increase came between 2020 and 2021, when the number rose from about 140,000 to a little over 161,000. 2021 is the most recent year for which final data from this survey is available.

The growth from 2020 to 2021 represented the largest percentage increase — 14.3% — of any year since 2017.

The second dataset comes from the Federal Reserve’s Survey of Consumer Finances, conducted every three years, most recently in 2022.

The 2022 survey found that 11% of Black households held equity in a business, far higher than the previous record of 6.6% in 2016.

Black-owned businesses also grew faster in several categories than businesses owned by whites, Asian Americans, Latinos or Hispanics, and Native Americans did. Black-owned businesses had a 7% increase in employees, a 30% increase in revenue, and a 27% increase in payroll in 2021, the analysis by Brookings, a Washington, D.C.-based think tank, showed. 

When contacted for comment, the White House shared independent analyses suggesting that some Biden policies helped spur these increases.

One policy involved changes the Biden administration made to the Paycheck Protection Program, a pandemic-era initiative that lent businesses money to keep workers paid when public health restrictions limited businesses’ operations. In most cases, the loans were designed to be excused if the recipient businesses followed the program’s regulations.

An August 2020 evaluation of the program found that minority-owned businesses were having trouble securing loans from the program, which began under former President Donald Trump and was approved with bipartisan congressional support.

When the program was phased out in June 2021, the Government Accountability Office found, “lending in traditionally underserved counties was proportional to their representation in the overall small-business community.” GAO cited changes during the Biden administration that stoked this shift, such as expanding lender participation in the program, including self-employed people, and seeking minority businesses for lending.

A January 2022 study by Robert Fairlie of the University of California, Santa Cruz, found similar gains for minority business owners in securing Paycheck Protection Program loans.

The path to full equity

Despite recent gains, Black business ownership continues to trail rates for white Americans.

In 2021, Black Americans represented 14.4% of the U.S. population but 2.7% of business owners. By contrast, white Americans accounted for 72.5% of the U.S. population while owning 82% of businesses. Asian Americans made up 6.3% of the population but owned 10.9% of businesses. Like Black Americans, Latinos and Native Americans also own a smaller share of businesses than their share of the population.

“Even if Black business ownership continued to grow at the rate it did in 2021 — the largest percentage increase since 2017 — Black-owned businesses would still not reach parity with their population share for another 80 years,” Brookings wrote.

Meanwhile, sole proprietorships — businesses without employees other than their owners — comprise a disproportionately large share of Black-owned businesses. Brookings wrote that although sole proprietorships “are an important driver of economic growth and wealth creation,” businesses with additional employees can grow even faster. The report says the high number of Black sole proprietorships stems partly from “unequal access to capital, networks, and government contracts.”

Our ruling

A Biden campaign ad said that during his presidency, there have been “record numbers of new Black entrepreneurs.”

Census Bureau and the Federal Reserve Board datasets found record levels of Black business ownership in 2021 and 2022. Independent analyses say that some of Biden’s policies likely played a role.

We rate the statement True.

Some social media posts are using the criminal sentencing of a man in Texas to criticize the state’s strict abortion laws. But the posts mischaracterize the law’s penalties. 

A Feb. 11 Instagram post shared an X post, from a Democratic Florida 2020 congressional candidate, that said a Texas man secretly gave his wife abortion pills, “severely damaging the fetus,” and was sentenced to 180 days in jail.

“If she had taken the abortion pills voluntarily, she would have been charged with MURDER,” the post said. “This is about controlling women.” 

Another Instagram post shared a similar message from a Democratic Illinois congressional candidate, who said a woman who gets an abortion in Texas can face a $10,000 fine or life in prison.

These claims are inaccurate about the penalties women who undergo abortions in Texas face. 

The posts refer to Mason Herring, a Houston man who, according to news reports, drugged his wife’s drinks aiming to induce an abortion. He was initially charged with felony assault to induce abortion, but pleaded guilty Feb. 7 to injury to a child and assault on a pregnant person. He was sentenced to 180 days in jail and 10 years probation.

Texas abortion laws are among the nation’s strictest. Although abortion is essentially outlawed in the state except for rare exceptions, women who get one are not subject to criminal or civil penalties, according to experts and the text of Texas’ abortion laws.

Republican Texas Gov. Greg Abbott signed House Bill 1280, known as the Human Life Protection Act, into law in June 2021. This so-called trigger law took effect Aug. 25, 2022, two months after the U.S. Supreme Court struck down Roe v. Wade.

Under the August 2022 law, a Texas physician who provides an abortion could be charged with a first-degree felony, which is punishable by at least five and up to 99 years in prison, and up to a $10,000 fine.

A provider could also face a civil penalty of at least $100,000, the law states.

But these penalties do not apply to women who undergo abortions, said Seth Chandler, a University of Houston law professor.

The trigger law added a new chapter to the state’s existing Health and Safety Code, to read:

“This chapter may not be construed to authorize the imposition of criminal, civil, or administrative liability or penalties on a pregnant female on whom an abortion is performed, induced, or attempted.”

Joanna Grossman, a Southern Methodist University law professor, said, “There are no laws in Texas that criminalize self-managed (or) (self-)induced abortion.”

The law that criminalizes abortion specifically refers only to providers, she said. She added that Texas’ penal code provisions on assault and homicide “both expressly state that nothing a woman does to end her own pregnancy is a crime.”

“There have been cases in which people have been wrongfully charged with crimes related to self-induced abortion,” Grossman said. “But that’s a problem with rogue prosecutors rather than a reflection of what the law provides.” 

Grossman pointed to an April 2022 case in which a Starr County, Texas, woman was arrested and charged with murder after she had what authorities called a self-induced abortion. A judge dismissed the charges shortly after the woman was arrested, and the district attorney said in a statement that it’s clear the woman “cannot and should not be prosecuted for the allegation against her.”

Elisabeth Smith, director of state policy and advocacy at the Center for Reproductive Rights, a group that advocates for abortion rights, said that although Texas’ abortion laws have exemptions for pregnant people, “that doesn’t mean that pregnant people in Texas have never been, or will never be, charged with a crime for ending a pregnancy or being suspected of ending a pregnancy.” 

Smith pointed to the Starr County case as an example, and research from before Roe v. Wade was overturned.

Also in 2021, Texas enacted Senate Bill 8, known as the heartbeat bill, which bans abortions after a fetal heartbeat is detected. Many reproductive health experts have said it’s medically inaccurate to describe sounds heard over an early ultrasound as a heartbeat. The heartbeat law doesn’t include criminal penalties, but allows anyone to sue a person who provides, induces or aids and abets an abortion. 

Still, Senate Bill 8 does not apply to women who have abortions, only to providers or people who help women get abortions. “Under this law, you cannot sue someone who received an abortion,” The Texas State Law Library said on a frequently asked questions webpage.

Our ruling

An Instagram post says if a woman in Texas takes “abortion pills voluntarily,” she would be “charged with murder.” 

Doctors who administer abortions can be charged under Texas’ 2022 abortion law that makes it a felony to provide an abortion and is punishable with up to life in prison. But the law explicitly states women who have abortions won’t face legal or civil penalties.

We rate the claim False.

Two years into the Russia-Ukraine war, some social media posts are claiming Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy is leaving his home country to become a United States citizen.

A Feb. 9 Instagram post shared an excerpt from a Dec. 8 episode of the “Redacted” podcast in which host Clayton Morris said the reports of Zelenskyy’s plans were revealed by an anonymous U.S. Secret Service agent.

Morris said the agent claims to have documents that show “the U.S. has already negotiated a plan to remove Zelenskyy from power, bring him to the United States as a U.S. citizen, and here you can see these naturalization documents.”

The video then shows a document titled “certificate of naturalization” with Zelenskyy’s photo and personal information.

Another Instagram post shared the same video. This post’s caption read, “Biden is giving Zelenskyy U.S. citizenship after Biden destabilized Ukraine. This is a complete mess.”

(Screengrab from Instagram)

These posts were 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.)

The naturalization certificate is inauthentic; it includes multiple discrepancies based on what the official document is supposed to include.

The supposed certificate shows the Ukrainian president’s first and last names, but not his full legal name, Volodymyr Oleksandrovych Zelenskyy, which is required. U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services specifies that “a full legal name includes the person’s first name, middle name(s) (if any), and family name (or surname) without any initials or nicknames.”

Authentic certificates include the USCIS director’s signature. The director is Ur M. Jaddou, who has served in that role since 2021. But the document shown in the video is signed by “Haley Burns,” who is not listed among USCIS agency leadership.

A reverse-image search using TinEye of the photo on the supposed document revealed that Zelenskyy’s headshot on the certificate was taken from a 2022 post on the Ukraine president’s official website.

A separate reverse-image search of the entire certificate using Google Images showed the photo was published in a November 2023 DC Weekly article. This site is known for spreading misinformation related to the Russia-Ukraine war.

The article says it was written by Jessica Devlin, whose author biography included with the article says she is a journalist with decades of experience who previously worked for Bloomberg News in Moscow. We found no record of Devlin’s work as a journalist outside of DC Weekly.

The author bio also includes a photo, supposedly of Devlin. However, a reverse-image search using Google Images revealed the woman in the photo is Judy Batalion, and the photo was taken from Batalion’s 2013 first-person essay on Jewish motherhood.

The supposed naturalization certificate says that Zelenskyy resides in Vero Beach, Florida, and one of the commenters on the Instagram post said, “Why Florida? Oh yeah he has a mansion there. How can he afford that? Oh yeah we sent (billions) to Ukraine.” We previously fact-checked a related claim that Zelenskyy owns a $35 million home in Florida and rated it False.

We found no credible news reports or government announcements from the U.S. or Ukraine about Zelenskyy leaving Ukraine to become a U.S. citizen.

We rate the claim that a photo shows Zelenskyy’s U.S. naturalization certificate False.

Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump spurred international alarm when he said he would “encourage” Russia to “do whatever the hell they want” to a NATO member country that didn’t “pay” for collective defense.

Trump made the comment Feb. 10 at a Conway, South Carolina, rally as he described a conversation with an unnamed NATO country leader during his presidency. Trump used the story to claim that he was tough on NATO and got results, misrepresenting several facts about the alliance and his record in the process.

“I got them to pay up,” Trump said. “NATO was busted until I came along. I said, ’Everybody’s gonna pay.’ They said, ‘Well, if we don’t pay, are you still going to protect us?’ I said, ‘Absolutely not.’ They couldn’t believe the answer, and you never saw more money pour in.”

NATO’s chief, European leaders and President Joe Biden criticized Trump’s remarks, with Biden saying Trump was too friendly to Russian President Vladimir Putin. Some Republicans downplayed what Trump said; others criticized him. 

We can’t fact-check whether that conversation happened, but we can examine how and why European defense spending changed under Trump (and other leaders). 

First, an important clarification: No countries are “delinquent” on NATO payments. For years, Trump has misrepresented a spending target for each country’s defense as payments owed to the alliance. 

“Countries falling short will have weaker defenses than we would like, but they are not delinquent,” said Stephen Saideman, a professor at Carleton University’s Norman Paterson School of International Affairs.

Many member countries have increased national defense spending since 2014.

But European leaders were probably thinking of a leader other than Trump.

“If any one person is responsible for getting Europeans to spend more on defense, it’s Vladimir Putin,” wrote Ivo Daalder, president of the Chicago Council on Foreign Affairs, and a U.S. Permanent Representative to NATO during part of the Obama administration. “Not Donald Trump.” 

We contacted Trump spokespeople and got no response.

John Bolton, who was Trump’s national security adviser in 2018 and is now a Trump critic, told The Washington Post that Trump pressed NATO partners aggressively to increase military spending, “but he didn’t say anything about not defending anybody against Russia.”

Putin’s aggression led to more spending by NATO allies

NATO, formally the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, was created in 1949 to provide collective security against the Soviet Union. The alliance has 31 members, including the United States.

The alliance agreed that an armed attack against one or more of them would constitute an attack against them all, and each member would take action, including armed force.

NATO countries do not pay money into a broad NATO defense budget; each country determines its own level of military spending. 

In 2014, after Russia’s illegal annexation of Crimea, NATO’s heads of state and government agreed to spend 2% of their GDP on defense by 2024, a target that had been discussed for many years.

The agreement was aspirational, not binding. Countries are not “delinquent” if they’ve missed that target.

“They’re welching on a commitment, but there is no enforcement mechanism,” said Justin Logan, Cato Institute director of defense and foreign policy studies. 

The 2% target is “about each country investing in their own defense so that the alliance as a whole could be stronger, better able to deter or defeat various threats (mostly Russia),” Saideman said.

NATO wasn’t “busted” when Trump became president in 2017.

NATO defense spending has been increasing since the 2014 Crimea annexation, and spending accelerated after Russia further invaded Ukraine in 2022, Jeremy Shapiro, the European Council on Foreign Relations’ research director, told PolitiFact. 

Justin Logan, the Cato Institute’s defense and foreign policy studies director, said Russia’s attacks and Trump’s statements affected the allies’ spending decisions.

“Poland’s skyrocketing spending, for instance, has everything to do with fear of Russia,” Logan said. Poland increased its defense spending as a share of GDP from about 2.4% in 2022 to 3.9% in 2023. 

As of July 2023, NATO reported that 11 countries met the 2% GDP goal: Estonia, Finland, Greece, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Romania, the Slovak Republic, the United Kingdom and the United States.

Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg said Feb. 14 that he expects 18 allies to spend 2% of GDP on defense in 2024 — a sixfold increase since 2014, when only three allies met the target.

“Politically, meeting the 2% level keeps your country out of the spotlight and in a general state of political grace,” Logan said, “which is why so many tiny and vulnerable East European countries do so.” 

Logan offered caveats about focusing on the 2%-of-GDP target. 

Two percent “of the German economy is more than double the entire Estonian economy,” pointing to GDP.

Many of the members meeting the target — Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania and Slovakia — offer almost no usable military power. 

“France and Turkey, which don’t meet the 2% standard, have far more firepower than most of those who meet the standard,” Logan said.

Trump is wrong to say that his threats alone prompted NATO allies to increase defense funding. The Barack Obama and Biden administrations also called for increased European defense spending.

“It is impossible to say whether Trump’s threats had more of an impact than Obama and Biden’s appeals to solidarity,” Shapiro said. 

Biden and top officials have supported the 2% target. When Biden met with Stoltenberg in June 2023, Biden said, “We’re going to be building on that momentum, from working to ensure that Allies spend enough on the defense, the 2 percent — not just as a hike, but that’s the bottom line.”

Every American president since Harry S. Truman urged European allies to do more, Daalder wrote. “Trump was hardly the first. Nor the last.”

RELATED: All of our fact-checks about foreign policy

RELATED: More than 1,000 fact-checks of Donald Trump 

PolitiFact Senior Correspondent Louis Jacobson contributed to this article.

After Beyoncé announced new music on the day of the Super Bowl LVIII, social media users are stirring up rumors of a conflict between the global superstar and the National Football League.

“Beyoncé faces nearly $10 billion loss following ‘Black national anthem’ performance at NFL,” read the text in a Feb. 13 Facebook post.

(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.)

In the comments, the post’s author linked to a nostalgianews24.com article with a headline identical to the claim. The article claimed that after Beyoncé performed “Lift Every Voice and Sing” at an NFL game, a “sizable portion” of Beyoncé’s fanbase, dubbed the “Beyhive,” sought membership fee refunds amounting to $1 billion.

But the text comes from a September 2023 article published by SpaceXMania, a satirical site. Its “About Us” page reads, “Quick heads up, though — every single article on our site is about as real as a unicorn sipping on a rainbow smoothie. They’re pure fantasy, folks, not a snapshot of reality.”

Beyoncé performed “Lift Every Voice and Sing” at the Coachella music festival in Indio, California, in 2018. We found no evidence in news reports or Google or Nexis database searches that such a performance by Beyoncé occurred at an NFL game.

Beyoncé is not facing nearly $10 billion in losses after singing the “Black national anthem” at an NFL game, because that performance didn’t happen. We rate that claim Pants on Fire!

COVID-19 is a viral infection spread through contact with an infected person. It is not caused by radiation poisoning, as one social media post claimed.

An Instagram video shows a person talking about illnesses’ root causes. The video‘s background shows a graphic that says COVID-19’s “root cause” is radiation poisoning. 

“2020,” the man says in the video. “Remember that whole thing? Radiation poisoning. Loss of smell, loss of taste, loss of hair, nausea, symptoms of radio wave sickness.”

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.)

COVID-19 is caused by the SARS-CoV–2 coronavirus according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. 

It is spread through close contact with an infected person when small respiratory particles are passed between people, the World Health Organization says. The CDC says people can sometimes contract COVID-19 through droplets on contaminated surfaces that they touch. 

The first four cases of COVID-19 were reported in December 2019 in Wuhan, China, when a local hospital identified “pneumonia of an unknown etiology.” In January 2020, COVID-19’s complete viral genetic sequence was released to some public health organizations, the CDC Museum COVID-19 Timeline shows. 

The International Commission on Non-Ionizing Radiation Protection issued a statement in 2020 that electromagnetic field exposure “does not cause COVID-19, nor does it have any effect on the disease process or health outcomes of those who are infected by the new corona virus.”

In 2021, we rated False a claim that connected radiation from wireless technologies with COVID-19. That post referred to a research paper, but the paper’s authors wrote that “none of the observations discussed here prove this linkage.” 

According to the Mayo Clinic, exposure to a high dose of radiation causes radiation poisoning. It is rare and most cases occurred after nuclear industrial accidents such as the explosion of the nuclear power plant in Chernobyl, Ukraine. Radiation poisoning symptoms include nausea and vomiting, hair loss, fever, diarrhea, headache, weakness and fatigue. 

The CDC lists COVID-19’s symptoms as fatigue, fever, diarrhea, headache, nausea or vomiting, new loss of taste or smell and sore throat.

Although some COVID-19 symptoms are also symptoms of radiation poisoning, they are not connected. 

We rate the claim that COVID-19 is caused by radiation poisoning False.  

The number of people incarcerated in Wisconsin is getting more and more attention, especially due to claims of overcrowding and understaffing for the number of people behind bars. 

During an event hosted on Feb. 1, 2024, in Madison by advocates for incarcerated people in Wisconsin,state  Sen. Kelda Roys, D-Madison, compared Wisconsin to other nearby states that incarcerate fewer people. 

In particular, she mentioned Minnesota, which “incarcerates about a third of the number of people Wisconsin does.” 

Is that true? 

Wisconsin does incarcerate far more people than Minnesota 

Data from the Minnesota Department of Corrections and the Wisconsin Department of Corrections show that, yes, Wisconsin does have far more people incarcerated than Minnesota, as of the end of June 2023. 

According to the Minnesota DOC data, there were a total of 8,274 people incarcerated in state prisons about mid-way through the year. 

And in Wisconsin, there were 21,332 people incarcerated in state prisons around that same time. 

One third of 21,332 is about 7,110 people. 

So Minnesota has more than one-third of the number of people incarcerated in its prisons, but Roy’s estimation really wasn’t far off. 

For reference, Wisconsin’s population is about 5.9 million people, according to the U.S. Census Bureau, while Minnesota’s population is about 5.7 million. 

When asked for more information about the claim, Jalen Knuteson, an aide to Roy, sent over a host of information regarding prison populations from the Prison Policy Initiative, which had slightly different numbers, from earlier in the year. 

According to information from the Initiative, as of May 2023, Wisconsin had about 20,000 people in state prisons. 

And for Minnesota, the Prison Policy Initiative listed 8,000 people in state prisons. 

Using those numbers, 8,000 is more than one-third of 20,000 as well. 

So while Wisconsin does have far more people in prisons across the state, Minnesota’s number of incarcerated people isn’t quite as low as one-third of Wisconsin’s numbers. But Roys didn’t claim that the number was exact, only about one-third. 

Roys, too, weighed in over the phone.

“The bottom line is that we are so far out of step with our peer states like Minnesota,” she said. “We’ve been incarcerating between double and triple the rate of folks. It’s just way too many.” 

Wisconsin incarcerates more people, not because people are committing more crimes, but because of revocations for rule violations by people on community supervision after being released from custody, according to an Oct. 26, 2023 report in the Green Bay Press-Gazette. About 30% of all new admissions in the state between 2000 and 2020 were for revocations. 

Revocations are strongly associated with substance abuse issues, the report said. 

Our ruling

Roys claimed that Minnesota has about one-third the number of people incarcerated than Wisconsin. 

As of the end of June last year, the most recent data available, Wisconsin had 21,332 incarcerated people, compared to the 8,274. That is about one third.

We rate the claim True.