Category: Fact Check

X users are blocked from searching for Taylor Swift, but it’s not because of past “pro-Biden” images of the singer, as social media posts claim. 

A Jan. 29 post from the X account @BidensWins — which describes itself as “the largest online community of President Biden’s supporters” — says: “Elon Musk is stopping individuals from searching “Taylor Swift” out of fear they will find this pro-Biden image of her.” It includes a photo of Swift holding a plate of cookies decorated with the Biden-Harris campaign logo and the words “Biden Harris 2020.”

The post also says, “Retweet to get the word out that Taylor is a Biden voter.”

It’s true that the platform is blocking users from searching Swift’s name, but the post gets the reason wrong. The restrictions were because sexually explicit images of Swift circulated on X over several days, with one image getting more than 47 million views, according to The New York Times. 

X suspended several accounts that were posting the images, the Times reported, and an X executive said in a statement that the platform was blocking all searches of the singer to keep the fake images from spreading, according to news reports from Time, NBC News and Axios. 

The White House, meanwhile, called the explicit fake images of Swift “alarming” and asked Congress to act legislatively to address harmful AI-generated images, according to Reuters. Musk has not publicly spoken about the fake Swift images or their circulation.

We rate the claim that Musk is not allowing X users to search for Swift on the platform “out of fear they will find this pro-Biden image of her” False. 

Whenever a new year approaches, many like to look back on what they did – and didn’t – achieve in the past year.

State Sen. Chris Larson, D-Milwaukee, did just that when he took to X to lament what legislation wasn’t passed in Wisconsin.

“Our far-right legislature has thwarted (Gov. Tony Evers’) every attempt to enact proven, progressive policies in WI. In 2023, we saw our neighbors (Minnesota, Michigan and Illinois) blow past us with a host of highly popular, landmark policy wins like cannabis, paid family leave, abortion rights, and more.”

Now Larson mentions a lot in his Dec. 12 post, but paid family leave caught our eye.

That refers to policies requiring employers to offer workers paid leave to care for a new child or care for themself or loved one with a serious health condition. 

It was introduced by Evers twice in last year’s legislative session but never made it to a vote. 

So, let’s look at what happened to Wisconsin’s paid family leave proposal, how popular the policy is in the Dairy State and what moves our neighbors made toward it in 2023.

Some of Wisconsin’s neighboring families gained paid leave in 2023

Larson’s post reads as though all three states passed policies on cannabis, paid family leave and abortion rights.

But when asked for backup, Justin Bielinski, Larson’s communications director, told us the tweet didn’t intend to say all three states passed marijuana, abortion and paid leave policies in 2023, but that each had passed at least one of the mentioned policies.

So, the poor phrasing gets Larson off on the wrong foot from the start.

Of the states mentioned, Minnesota was the only one to pass specific legislation on paid family leave in 2023. The measure will provide nearly every working Minnesotan paid leave when they cannot work because of serious health or caregiving needs. 

Last year, Illinois passed the Paid Leave for All Workers Act, which requires 40 hours of paid leave per year at companies with at least five employees. 

But “paid leave” can differ from “paid family leave.” The former provides compensation for any number of reasons, although the latter is specified leave to care for a child, family member or one’s health. 

Additionally, general paid leave provides full hourly wages for time off, while paid family leave typically provides a designated portion of income and comes with more time off.

So, Minnesota’s and Illinois’ laws differ in that Minnesota’s law guarantees workers the right to paid leave when they cannot work because of serious health or caregiving needs. In contrast, Illinois’ law gives workers paid leave to be used for any reason.

And vice versa, Minnesota’s new law requires paid leave of employers only for health and caregiving reasons — but doesn’t require a general paid leave option. 

Our other neighbor, Michigan, didn’t pass any new paid leave laws last year, though it did renew a 2019 paid sick leave law.

Wisconsin Republicans block Evers’ paid family leave bills

There were two times last year Evers introduced paid family leave bills and little — if any — action on paid family leave was initiated by the Republican-controlled Legislature.

Evers proposed public and private sector workers get 12 weeks of paid family and medical leave benefits in his budget plan at the beginning of 2023. But that proposal was cut by Republicans during the budget adoption process.. 

Paid family leave reemerged in September when Evers drafted an expansive bill on funding the state’s child care providers. The proposed legislation included provisions for a paid family leave program.

Evers requested a special session for the bill and after multiple changes were made to it by GOP lawmakers, Evers vetoed the bill.

Paid family leave is popular in Wisconsin — even among Republicans

Larson’s tweet also claims policies such as paid family leave are “highly popular.”

A November 2022 Marquette Law School poll found 73% of Wisconsinites favor paid family leave for mothers and fathers of new babies. This includes 62% of Republicans favoring it and 95% of Democrats. The poll had a margin of error of 4.6 percentage points.

Those numbers support Larson’s claim that paid family leave is popular in Wisconsin.

Our ruling

Larson said in the past year, Michigan, Minnesota and Illinois passed “highly popular” policies on cannabis, paid family leave and abortion rights — issues that have been stymied in Wisconsin by Republicans.

Evers twice tried passing paid family leave policy. Both times, GOP lawmakers blocked the policy, even though recent polls find it favorable among voters in both parties.

In 2023, Minnesota managed to get its paid family leave bill into law, but the other states did not.

The post was poorly worded — something his office acknowledged, and, in our view, was confusing to anyone who read it. It reads as though all three neighboring states passed paid family leave policies.

Based on how the post reads, we rate the claim Half True, which we define as “the statement is partially accurate but leaves out important details or takes things out of context.”

El presidente de Ecuador Daniel Noboa declaró un estado de emergencia nacional el 8 de enero tras ataques violentos a instituciones públicas, privadas y gubernamentales por parte de grupos armados. 

Una publicación en TikTok dice que se firmó un acuerdo entre Ecuador y Estados Unidos, en el que Estados Unidos enviará presencia militar a Ecuador para lidiar con la violencia. Pero esto es engañoso.

 “Los gobiernos de Estados Unidos y Ecuador firmaron un acuerdo que permitiría el envío a la nación suramericana de fuerzas militares de aquel país con el presunto objetivo de hacer frente a las organizaciones de actividades ilícitas”, dice el video del 9 de enero. 

El subtítulo añadió: “Ecuador firma acuerdo con los Estados Unidos para obtener presencia militar debido a los recientes acontecimientos por parte de delicuentes”.

Un video similar en Facebook dice que Estados Unidos envía fuerzas militares a Ecuador.

La publicación fue marcada 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 Departamento de Defensa de los Estados Unidos dijo a PolitiFact que lo que dicen las publicaciones en redes sociales no es cierto.

El 9 de enero, 13 encapuchados asaltaron el medio de comunicación ecuatoriano, TC Televisión. Los asaltantes — en vivo — amenazaron a periodistas con pistolas, granadas y dinamita. 

John Kirby, el coordinador de comunicaciones estratégicas del Consulado de Seguridad Nacional, dijo el 10 enero en una rueda de prensa que la administración de Biden no ha tenido ninguna conversación específica con Noboa y que estarían dispuestos a hablar sobre lo que Ecuador necesite. Pero, no hay planes de que los Estados Unidos envíen tropas militares a Ecuador, él añadió. 

El Departamento de Estado de los Estados Unidos dijo el 11 de enero en un comunicado denunciando la reciente violencia que reforzarán su cooperación con Ecuador a través de programas de asistencia de seguridad.

Reuters reportó el 22 de enero que oficiales estadounidenses de alto rango visitarán Ecuador para fortalecer su cooperación en seguridad y combatir el crimen organizado. Pero este reporte tampoco menciona ningún acuerdo militar firmado por los dos gobiernos.

La cuenta oficial en Instagram de la embajada y el consulado general de los Estados Unidos en Ecuador publicó el 22 de enero una foto del embajador Mike Fitzpatrick dándole la bienvenida a oficiales estadounidenses que se reunirán con las contrapartes ecuatorianas para “acelerar la cooperación bilateral en materia de seguridad”. Pero no hay ninguna publicación en la cuenta que se refiera a un acuerdo de enviar tropas militares. 

No hay pruebas de que Ecuador haya firmado un acuerdo militar con los Estados Unidos debido a la reciente delincuencia, así que calificamos esta declaración como Falsa. 

Lea más reportes de PolitiFact en Español aquí.

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Debido a limitaciones técnicas, partes de nuestra página web aparecen en inglés. Estamos trabajando en mejorar la presentación.

 

An Instagram post baselessly accused the judge who handled two defamation lawsuits involving former president Donald Trump of sex trafficking, sharing an article that referred to the judge’s role in a Jeffrey Epstein-related lawsuit.

A Jan. 28 Instagram post shared a screenshot of a Truth Social post from Gateway Pundit that  linked to an article on the conservative website with the headline, “Who is Bill Clinton-Appointed Judge Lewis Kaplan, the Judge in the E. Jean Carroll Case?”

Sticker text atop the Instagram post read “Wait till you find out he was involved in sex trafficking.”

The 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 Gateway Pundit article does not, however, say that Kaplan is involved in sex trafficking. If Kaplan, a high-profile federal judge, were accused of such a crime, there would be news coverage, but we could find none in a search of Google and a Nexis database.

We found no evidence that Kaplan has been accused of or charged with sex trafficking. 

(Instagram screenshot)

A Manhattan jury on Jan. 26 awarded Carroll, a longtime advice columnist and journalist, $83.3 million in her defamation lawsuit against Trump, whom she accused of raping her in a New York department store in 1996.

That verdict is in addition to the $5 million a jury awarded Carroll in May after finding Trump liable for sexually abusing her.

Kaplan presided over both trials, and the Gateway Pundit article criticizes his rulings in the cases.

The article also noted that Kaplan has been involved in other high-profile trials, and that he dismissed a lawsuit against Britain’s Prince Andrew by one of Epstein’s accusers. Epstein died by suicide in 2019 in a Manhattan jail cell while awaiting trial on federal sex trafficking charges.

Virginia Giuffre, who accused Epstein of sex trafficking her, in 2021 filed a lawsuit against Prince Andrew, whom she accused of sexually assaulting her when she was 17.

Kaplan dismissed that case in March 2022, only after lawyers for Giuffre and Prince Andrew reached a settlement that included a large donation from the prince to Giuffre’s charity. Two months earlier, Kaplan had rejected Prince Andrew’s motion to dismiss the case.

We rate the Instagram post’s claim that Kaplan was involved in sex trafficking Pants on Fire!

Vice President Kamala Harris launched a national tour to promote the Biden administration’s commitment to abortion rights in Wisconsin, where abortion was effectively banned for 15 months under a 19th century law before a judge restored laws that allow abortions up to 20 weeks. 

In her speech in Big Bend, Harris attacked former President Donald Trump, the Republican presidential front-runner, for bragging about appointing three of the justices who voted to overturn Roe v. Wade, the Supreme Court precedent that enshrined abortion access nationally until the court overturned it in June 2022.

“This is, in fact, a health care crisis and there is nothing about this that is hypothetical,” Harris told the crowd. “Today in America, 1 in 3 women of reproductive age live in a state with an abortion ban.”

With abortion as a top election issue, we wanted to check out the statistic.

Harris’ claim was similar to a White House fact sheet that said “more than 23 million women of reproductive age — one in three — live in one of the 18 states with an abortion ban currently in effect.”

This includes 14 states where women cannot get abortions at any point in pregnancy, with limited exceptions. Two other states — Georgia and South Carolina — ban abortions past six weeks, when most women don’t yet know they are pregnant and haven’t had a chance to see a doctor.

Two additional states, Nebraska and North Carolina, outlaw abortion after 12 weeks, around the earliest point in pregnancy when women can find out the fetus’ sex and if it carries certain chromosomal abnormalities, including Down syndrome, Trisomy 13 and Edwards syndrome.

States that ban abortion at six weeks or less can be reasonably considered to have “bans” on the books, experts told PolitiFact, as they leave residents with minimal access to an abortion. Others said laws could be categorized as a ban if they apply at conception or at any other point in pregnancy.

Harris’ statistic is close even when counting just the populations of states with abortion bans at six weeks or less.

How many U.S. women of reproductive age live in states with abortion bans

Women who are considered to be of “reproductive age” in the United States are typically 15 to 44 years old. Some researchers and government organizations use a range of 15 to 49 years old to better reflect the increasing number of women having children later in life. 

There are about 65 million women in the U.S. ages 15 to 44, and about 75 million 15 to 49, 2022 Census data shows. 

Harris’ office pointed PolitiFact to news reports that found about 21 million to 25 million women of childbearing age lived in states that banned abortion or posed more restrictions on it than before Roe v. Wade was overturned.

The Guttmacher Institute, a research group that supports abortion rights, found in October 2022 that almost 22 million women ages 15 to 49 lived in states where abortion was “unavailable or severely restricted,” amounting to about 29% of the total U.S. population of women in that age range. Guttmacher’s media office told PolitiFact that the number is likely higher today, given the passage of more restrictions.

The Associated Press found in June 2023 that more than 25 million women ages 15 to 44 live in states where the law makes abortions harder to get than they were before Roe was overturned. About 5.5 million more women, the report said, live in states where restrictions have been adopted but are on hold pending court challenges. 

“Given the shifting landscape of abortion laws, many organizations have different definitions and categories for states’ abortion laws,” said Laurie Sobel, women’s health policy director at KFF.

Today, approximately 21.5 million women ages 15 to 49 live in the 14 states that totally ban abortion, and in the two states with six-week bans in effect, she said. That comes out to about 29% of women of childbearing age, or about 1 in 3.4.

Exceptions to these abortion laws generally fall into four categories: to prevent the mother’s death, when there is a risk to the pregnant woman’s health, when the pregnancy results from rape or incest, and when there is a lethal fetal anomaly. Although most state abortion bans and restrictions have some exceptions, PolitiFact and others have found that, in practice, few are granted.

Tallying how many states have abortion bans is complex, but Harris’ number sounded right and could be considered an undercount, said Mary Ziegler, an abortion historian and law professor at the University of California, Davis.

Some strict statewide abortion bans are tied up in litigation. A ban held up in court isn’t in effect, but it can still affect women by making physicians more hesitant to provide abortions, Ziegler said. In Florida, for example, a six-week abortion ban that Gov. Ron DeSantis signed into law is on hold while the state’s Supreme Court weighs whether Florida’s current 15-week ban is constitutional, causing uncertainty for both patients and doctors.

Our ruling

Harris said 1 in 3 women of reproductive age live in a state with an abortion ban.

About 21.5 million women of reproductive age — 15 to 49 — live in states that ban abortions after six weeks of pregnancy. That’s about 29% of U.S. women in this age group.

But even more women live in states where abortion is banned later in pregnancy. When adding in states that ban abortion after 12 or 15 weeks of pregnancy, the number of affected women grows to about 25 million, or about 40%.

We rate Harris’ claim True.

PolitiFact Senior Correspondent Louis Jacobson contributed to this report. 

A video showed dozens of people, mostly clad in black, walking up a spiral ramp, some carrying U.S. flags and others recording the scene on their phones. 

“Heading to Texas to stop the Biden Border Invasion. We’ve. Had. Enough,” read the text on the Jan. 28 Instagram video. It appeared to refer to legal battles between Texas and the Biden administration over border security.

Screenshot from Instagram

The 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 the video doesn’t show people heading to Texas to protest now. The video is 4 years old. The protesters gathered for a different issue. And the protest was nowhere near Texas. 

The video was filmed in 2019, when right-wing protesters and antifa clashed in Portland, Oregon.

The claim also circulated on X, with one Jan. 26 post drawing a Community Note that said the footage is from 2019 in Portland. The note cited an X post by Ford Fischer, News2Share editor-in-chief, who attached a YouTube video of the 2019 event.

The News2Share YouTube video showed far-right groups including the Proud Boys at an “End Domestic Terrorism” rally against antifa.

The YouTube footage does not show the exact same scene that the Instagram video depicts, but some people appear in both clips. For example, a man with glasses, brown cap, scarf and backpack who is seen up close in the Instagram video also appears in the News2Share YouTube video at the 2:44 timestamp. 

Using satellite imagery, we verified where the Instagram video was shot. We identified features in the video, such as buildings, that corresponded with a satellite image of the view from the spiral ramp next to Morrison Bridge in Portland. The colors of the boxes show how they match.

Left image screengrabbed from Instagram post, right image screengrabbed from Google Earth

There are efforts to organize people who want to visit the Texas border to stop migrant crossings. 

But this video doesn’t show that. We rate that claim False.

Usuarios en las redes sociales afirman que en China se está inventando una enfermedad que es más mortal que el COVID-19.

“#China experimenta con una nueva cepa de #Covid que muestra ser 100% mortal”, dice una publicación en Facebook del 18 de enero. 

Otra publicación en TikTok del 17 de enero similarmente dice que científicos chinos han creado una “cepa mutante de coronavirus que ataca el cerebro y tiene una probabilidad de mortalidad del 100%”.

La publicación fue marcada 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).

Algunos medios de comunicación, como el New York Post, La Vanguardia y El Universal, también publicaron titulares sobre el estudio que advertía de una nueva “cepa” mortal del COVID-19.

Pero los expertos en virología, tanto los que participaron en el estudio como los independientes, afirmaron que las publicaciones en las redes sociales y los titulares de las noticias han malinterpretado los hallazgos.

Dan Wilson, biólogo molecular y divulgador científico que no participó en el estudio, afirma que el pánico que han provocado las publicaciones en las redes sociales es infundado. Wilson presenta “Debunk the Funk with Dr. Wilson”, un programa de YouTube sobre desinformación científica.

“Se trata de una investigación importante que simplemente pone de relieve las amenazas que ya existen en la naturaleza e intenta conocerlas antes de que se conviertan en un problema inmediato”, afirmó Wilson, que también es científico asociado principal en Janssen, una de las empresas farmacéuticas que desarrolló una vacuna contra el COVID-19.

El estudio en animales de un virus similar al SARS-CoV-2 “no es aplicable” a los humanos

En el estudio preimpreso, publicado el 4 de enero, 10 investigadores de Pekín y Nanjing en China probaron un tipo de coronavirus para ver si podía causar la enfermedad en ratones de laboratorio. Como preimpresión, este estudio no ha sido sometido a una revisión por expertos, en la que otros científicos con conocimientos comparables a los de los investigadores leen la investigación y evalúan su metodología y validez.

Los investigadores del estudio no “crearon una nueva cepa COVID-19”, como se afirma en las redes sociales y en los artículos de prensa. Trabajaban con un coronavirus diferente llamado GX_P2V, que según el estudio, se descubrió en 2017 en pangolines, a veces conocidos como osos hormigueros escamosos.

El GX_P2V es similar al SARS-CoV-2, causante del COVID-19; ambos pertenecen a la gran familia de los coronavirus. Pero los expertos afirman que GX_P2V no es una cepa, variante o mutación del COVID-19.

Se sabe que los coronavirus mutan rápidamente, produciendo variantes virales. Desde su descubrimiento en el laboratorio, el GX_P2V se ha ido adaptando a lo largo de muchas generaciones, según el estudio. 

Para este estudio, los investigadores clonaron una variante de GX_P2V adaptada a las células.

Los científicos suelen utilizar en sus experimentos ratones “humanizados”, es decir, injertados con algo de origen humano, porque pueden servir de modelo para la investigación de enfermedades humanas. En este caso, según el estudio, los ratones humanizados fueron modificados genéticamente para expresar ACE2, la proteína que el SARS-CoV-2 utiliza para entrar en las células del cuerpo humano. Sin esta mutación, los ratones no pueden infectarse, según los expertos.

El profesor e investigador de la Universidad de Tecnología Química de Pekín, Lihua Song, que participó en el estudio, dijo a PolitiFact que la investigación pretendía probar la inmunidad de los ratones al virus, “no imitar la infección humana”.

Los cuatro ratones infectados con GX_P2V murieron inesperadamente a los ocho días, probablemente a causa de una grave infección cerebral, según el estudio.

Típicamente los cerebros de los ratones y los humanos tienen niveles bajos de la proteína ACE2, dijo Song.

Pero los ratones humanizados utilizados en este experimento, desarrollados por Beijing SpePharm Biotechnology Co., tenían una “alta expresión” de ACE2 en sus tejidos cerebrales y pulmonares, lo que los hacía más susceptibles a la infección, dijo Song.

“Los resultados experimentales obtenidos con este modelo no pueden extrapolarse para sugerir infecciones similares en humanos”, afirmó Song.

Parte de la desinformación en torno a este estudio parece proceder del propio estudio. La primera versión del estudio preimpreso afirmaba incorrectamente que existe un “riesgo de propagación” del GX_P2V a los humanos, dijo Song. Pero él mismo dijo que “no tenemos datos que lo confirmen”.

Después de que se difundieran en internet interpretaciones erróneas del estudio, Song lo publicó el 17 de enero en el foro de investigación Science Cast para aclarar sus conclusiones. 

El 21 de enero, se publicó una versión actualizada del estudio que según dijo Song a PolitiFact, “se revisó fundamentalmente para confirmar el hecho de que estos resultados en animales no son aplicables a los humanos”.

El estudio actualizado dice que el GX_P2V podría ayudar a determinar si las vacunas y los fármacos pueden proteger eficazmente contra el COVID-19 y sus futuras variantes. Por ejemplo, los investigadores podrían vacunar a los ratones para el COVID-19 y luego infectarlos con GX_P2V para evaluar si una vacuna contra el COVID-19 podría proteger contra otros coronavirus, dijo Song.

Nuestro veredicto

Una publicación en Facebook dice que científicos chinos han experimentado con una nueva cepa del COVID-19 que “muestra ser 100% mortal”.

Los investigadores en China clonaron y probaron una variante adaptada a las células de GX_P2V, un coronavirus descubierto en 2017, en ratones humanizados. Los investigadores no crearon GX_P2V y no se originó a partir de SARS-CoV-2, que causa COVID-19.

Los cuatro ratones infectados con el virus murieron en el experimento, pero los investigadores dijeron que los hallazgos no se aplican a los humanos.

Calificamos esta afirmación como Falsa.

Una versión de este artículo originalmente fue escrito en inglés y traducido por Marta Campabadal Graus.

Read a version of this check in English.

Lea más reportes de PolitiFact en Español aquí.

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Debido a limitaciones técnicas, partes de nuestra página web aparecen en inglés. Estamos trabajando en mejorar la presentación.

Former President Donald Trump repeatedly blames his 2020 election loss on Democrats using COVID-19 to “cheat” — even after winning the Iowa caucus and the New Hampshire primary in his 2024 presidential bid.

“They used COVID to cheat and they did a lot of other things, too,” Trump said during his Jan. 23 victory speech in Nashua, urging his supporters to “never forget history” 

We’ve heard him say it before, including in October 2021, in May 2022, and along the campaign trail in April.

“Democrats used COVID to cheat,” he said during a July 2021 Florida rally. “They illegally changed the rules in the key states and mailed out millions and millions of absentee ballots all over.” 

We asked Trump campaign spokespeople for Trump’s evidence and received no reply.

PolitiFact has repeatedly rated claims that the 2020 election was rigged or that Joe Biden was illegitimately elected Pants on Fire. Trump is also wrong to state that Democrats used COVID-19 to “cheat.” Although many states made changes to increase access to voting by mail, that was not a Democratic plot.

In Kentucky, the Republican secretary of state and Democratic governor, using powers granted by the Republican-controlled General Assembly, authorized no-excuse mail-in voting and no-excuse early voting in 2020, said Republican Trey Grayson, a former Kentucky secretary of state. 

“Changing election laws or policies to successfully conduct an election in the middle of a pandemic when those changes are authorized by law is not cheating,” Grayson said. “Cheating would be doing so without any authorization.” 

Many states changed election procedures due to pandemic

Trump’s comments appear to allude to states’ changing procedures in 2020 to ease voting by mail during the pandemic, when in-person gatherings appeared to raise the risk of viral spread. The National Conference of State Legislatures cited many examples including:

• Relaxed excuses to vote absentee: In January 2020, 16 states required voters to identify a reason for requesting an absentee ballot. Before the 2020 general election, 14 of the 16 states changed their requirements for getting an absentee ballot. They included Alabama, Arkansas, Connecticut, Delaware, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, Missouri, New Hampshire, New York, South Carolina, Tennessee, West Virginia and Virginia.

• Mostly mail-elections: In January 2020, five states used mostly-mail elections: Colorado, Hawaii, Oregon, Utah and Washington. Before November 2020, California, Vermont and the District of Columbia temporarily joined this group. Nevada passed Assembly Bill 4, which stated that, under a state of emergency, all active registered voters would be sent a mail ballot, and made that permanent the next year.

• Mailing ballot applications to all voters: In January 2020, no states had policies to mail applications for absentee ballots or mail ballots to all registered voters. In time for the 2020 general election, 12 states temporarily changed their policies and mailed ballot applications to all registered voters. They included Connecticut, Delaware, Illinois, Iowa, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, Nebraska, Ohio, Rhode Island and Wisconsin. New Mexico passed a bill that left this decision to each county clerk.

• Drop boxes: In January 2020, just eight states had statutes authorizing the use of ballot drop boxes or set minimum standards for operations. For the 2020 general election, drop boxes were used statewide or in some cities or counties in 40 states and Washington, D.C., according to the Stanford-MIT Healthy Elections Project. 

The changes came about through legislative actions, executive orders and administrative decisions by state and local officials, said Rachel Orey, an elections expert at the Bipartisan Policy Center.

Under no standard definition did this qualify as cheating. 

Many states — red, blue and battleground — aimed to make voting by mail easier so voters concerned about COVID-19 could avoid voting indoors. Voters of both major parties and independents could vote under the new mail ballot rules.

Many key battleground states, including Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, already had no-excuse absentee voting before the pandemic.

Some courts did rule against enacted or planned election administration decisions, including policies related to checking signatures in Michigan, curbside voting in Alabama and absentee ballot deadlines in Minnesota. But those rulings don’t signal cheating, either.

“Cheating is fraud, like stuffing a ballot box or altering vote totals,” said Edward B. Foley, director of Election Law at Ohio State University. “Even if changing the rules for return of absentee ballots was an impermissible change, it was pursuant to a legal process (the rule of law), above board, and not a denial of the electorate’s preference by fabricating a different outcome than what the voters wanted.”

These election procedure changes were executed as part of authorized public processes. In New Hampshire, the state’s attorney general and secretary of state in written guidance, and later lawmakers through legislation, said COVID-19 was an excuse to vote by mail in 2020.

“This clearly was not cheating and was legal and resulted in a strong but not unusual turnout notwithstanding the pandemic,” said Bradford E. Cook, a Republican, lawyer and chair of the state’s Ballot Law Commission.

Sporadic cases of voter fraud have been uncovered since the election, including a small number of people who cast mail ballots in dead relatives’ names. But these accounted for a minuscule percentage of votes cast and would not have changed Trump’s loss. 

The 2020 election outcome was verified in many ways. States certified the results. Congress accepted the results. Trump and his allies lost in court more than 60 times. 

Republicans have laid the groundwork for election challenges in 2024. The Republican National Committee in 2021 launched a Committee on Election Integrity and later an Election Integrity Department. It participated in nearly 100 lawsuits during the midterms and is recruiting thousands of poll workers in preparation for November. 

Our ruling

Trump said Democrats “used COVID to cheat” in the 2020 election.

Trump didn’t elaborate. But in similar remarks in 2021, he mentioned states mailing out ballots.

Many states made voting easier during the pandemic by mailing a ballot or an application to receive a ballot to registered voters. Some states that previously required voters to have an excuse to vote by mail loosened that rule.

Trump is free to disagree with these changes, but he is wrong — and ridiculously so — to characterize them as cheating. These changes were made openly, through executive orders, administrative actions or law. And when a state expanded access to voting by mail, that was available to Republican voters, too. 

We rate this statement Pants on Fire! 

RELATED: Trump’s new ‘evidence’ that Biden lost in 2020 is ridiculously wrong (and dusty). We reviewed it.

Social media posts are claiming that an Azerbaijani man entered the U.S. from the southern border, but the man shown in the posts isn’t whom they say. 

“Remember this face. Movsum Samadov, who was previosly sentenced to 12 years in prison for terrorism, was filmed walking across the Texas border last week,” says a Jan. 23 Facebook post that misspelled “previously” by Muskegon Underground, which calls itself a parody/satire page. But the video had no trace of a joke. Other accounts on Facebook, X, Instagram and TikTok made the same claim. 

A Facebook video shows the man saying, “Soon you’re gonna know who I am.”

The Facebook and Instagram 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.) 

Samadov, the head of the Islamic Party of Azerbaijan, was arrested in 2011 and sentenced to 12 years in prison. He was convicted of criminal charges including the preparation of terrorism, possessing illegal weapons and attempting a coup.

Human Rights Watch reported in 2011 that before Samadov was convicted, he was arrested after posting a speech on Youtube denouncing Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev’s ban on women wearing headscarves in schools and universities. He was released Jan. 19, 2023, after completing his sentence, according to the United States Commission on International Religious Freedom. 

PolitiFact found that the viral footage of the migrant originated Jan. 20 from an X account with the username @1strespondersmedia, which calls itself a news outlet. The original post says that a migrant who illegally crossed into the U.S. threatened the poster after he simply asked him where he was from, but it never mentions that the man is Samadov. The thread in the post also says that the encounter happened in Sasabe, Arizona.

The Terrorism Research & Analysis Consortium, which provides information and analyses of terrorist groups, posted on X that Samadov was wrongly identified as a man crossing the border illegally. 

Social media users showed a 2011 picture of Samadov to claim that he is the man in the posts, but more recent images and Youtube videos show him looking older and bearing little resemblance to the man in the social media video.

Samadov told Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty in a Jan. 24 interview that he is not the man in the posts. (We translated the interview from Azerbaijani to English using Google Translate.)

Samadov said the person in the video didn’t look like him, and pointed out that the man has few similarities with him, except for glasses.

The image on the left is a screenshot of a Facebook post and the picture on the right is a screenshot from Samadov’s Facebook account.

Samadov also explained in the interview that he is banned from leaving Azerbaijan. He said he has tried twice to visit the U.S. but hasn’t been granted permission. 

We were not able to find the identity of the man in the video, or his country of origin, but a spokesperson from the Department of Homeland Security told PolitiFact that he is in U.S. custody. 

PolitiFact reached out to the U.S. Customs and Border Protection and U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement but didn’t get a response. 

We rate the claim that a video shows Samadov coming to the U.S. southern border False. 

PolitiFact researcher Caryn Baird contributed to this report.

A new drug to protect newborns and infants against respiratory syncytial virus, or RSV, has prompted concern on social media about children’s deaths during the drug’s clinical trials.

A federal health agency says the children died from other causes, not the drug.

A Jan. 27 Instagram post has sticker text on a video that said, “When the CDC signs off on a new RSV (syringe emoji) after 12 deaths in the clinical trials.” A man in the video says, “Hold up. Wait a minute. Something ain’t right.”

The video also includes a screenshot of a headline about the deaths from The Defender, a website for Children’s Health Defense, an anti-vaccine organization founded by Robert F. Kennedy Jr. 

The 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 post accurately notes the number of deaths in clinical trials for the drug nirsevimab, but it misleads because none of them were tied to the drug. 

(Instagram screenshot)

Nirsevimab — sold under the brand name Beyfortus by AstraZeneca — is not a vaccine, but a monoclonal antibody product that provides up to five months of protection against RSV in newborns, infants and children up to 2 years old. The CDC calls it a passive immunization, different from vaccines’ active immunization.

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration in July 2023 approved the drug for babies entering their first RSV season and for children up to age 2 who are vulnerable to RSV. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recommended the drug a month later for the 2023-24 RSV season. These seasons generally start in the fall and peak in the winter, the CDC said.

RSV is a common respiratory virus that is typically mild and similar to a cold for most adults and healthy children. But it can cause severe illness in some babies and infants. 

Up to 3% of children in their first year of life are hospitalized with RSV infections, and up to 80,000 children younger than 5 are hospitalized annually, the American Academy of Pediatrics said. RSV is the leading cause of hospitalization in infants, the American Lung Association said.

In five pediatric clinical trials for nirsevimab, there were 12 deaths of children out of 3,710 who had taken the drug, versus four deaths out of 1,797 in the placebo control groups, the FDA noted in a June 2023 briefing document. 

None of the 12 deaths, however, were caused by the drug, the FDA said. 

Eight deaths were “clearly unrelated” to the drug, the agency wrote. That included three deaths of children with congenital heart disease, two with untreated gastroenteritis, one with COVID-19, one with a tumor and one with a fractured skull after being hit by a car, the FDA said.

Two children died of lower respiratory tract infections, one with severe malnutrition and one with multiple underlying conditions. One of those children had been taken home from a hospital against medical advice.

Two other children died of “unknown” causes and were found dead in their cribs, the FDA said. One had multiple prior hospitalizations and may have had “an underlying congenital metabolic or chromosomal anomaly.” The other child was healthy and the death was “consistent with sudden infant death syndrome,” the FDA report said, noting autopsy results were not available and the cause of death is unknown.

The FDA briefing also noted the mortality rate in infants who had received the drug — 3.1 per 1,000 —  was much lower than the 2021 global infant mortality rate of 28 infant deaths per 1,000 live births.

The FDA concluded in its briefing that the majority of deaths were related to causes other than the drug and others were complicated by underlying conditions.

“None of the deaths were judged as related to the study drug product. At this time, it is the assessment of the Agency that none of the deaths were likely related to the study drug,” the agency concluded.

An Instagram post claimed that 12 children died from taking an RSV drug in clinical trials, but the FDA said those deaths were not related to the drug being studied. We rate the claim False.