Category: Fact Check

  • Fact Check: Did Americans lose the farm? Fact-checking Joe Biden on farmland loss

    President Joe Biden recently visited Minnesota farmland and touted how his economic policies are bolstering rural America. 

    Biden said fewer Americans are able to keep “the farm in the family,” and, to emphasize his point, offered figures about the loss of agricultural land in recent decades.

    “Over the past four decades, we’ve lost over 400,000 farms in America (and) over 140 million acres of farmland,” Biden said Nov. 1. “And that’s an area roughly equal to the size of Minnesota, North and South Dakota combined.”

    That’s a lot of lost land. A reader heard his statistics and asked us to fact-check them.

    We found the numbers are accurate, at least by one standard measure. But some agriculture experts caution against deciding that the news is dire.

    The White House pointed us to data from the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s National Agricultural Statistics Service. According to that data, from 1982 to 2022, the number of U.S. farm operations fell from 2,406,550 to 2,002,700. That’s a decrease of 403,850 farms.

    Over the same period, farm acreage fell from 1.027 billion acres to 893.4 million acres. That’s a decline of 134.4 million acres — less than what Biden said.

    When we examined historical farm data, we found that the sharpest decline in farm operations occurred from the 1930s to the 1970s. During the period Biden cited, the number of farms has fallen, but more slowly.

    To test Biden’s comparison with Minnesota and the Dakotas, we calculated the land area of all three states. (States also have water area, which is substantial for a Great Lakes state like Minnesota, so we removed water acreage from the calculation.)

    The three states’ total land area is 137 million acres, close to the farm acreage lost between 1982 and 2022.

    There is more than one source of data for measuring U.S. agriculture. Data from the U.S. Census Bureau, for instance, found smaller numbers for farms and acreage in 1982: 2.24 million farms and 986 million acres. This would make the decline of each of these metrics less steep than Biden indicated in his speech.

    Also, there’s no consensus definition for “farm.”

    “The term ‘farm’ is fairly fluid,” said Claire Strom, a historian who specializes in agriculture at Rollins College. “Does it include hobby farms? Market gardens? Not-for-profit organizations?”

    President Joe Biden tours Dutch Creek Farms in Northfield, Minn., on Nov. 1, 2023. (AP)

    Behind the numbers

    Experts cautioned that numbers alone don’t tell the full story. 

    Nostalgia for the old-fashioned family farm is common, but experts said the inevitable march of technology and economics has pushed smaller operations aside and left fewer, larger operations.

    “Farms probably will get larger and become fewer in number in the years ahead. This is not necessarily a problem,” said R. Douglas Hurt, a Purdue University history professor who specializes in agriculture. “Small-scale family farms are not more economically viable or more moral than large corporate farms, most of which are family corporations for tax purposes.”

    According to the Agriculture Department, production of food and other agricultural products nearly tripled between 1948 and 2017. That means that even as the land and labor used in farming declined, “innovations in animal and crop genetics, chemicals, equipment and farm organization have enabled continuing growth in farm output,” the department said.

    And as fewer people are needed to produce the same number of farm goods, people have left rural areas. Population loss has gone hand in hand with technological advances that meant fewer people could produce the same, or larger, crops.

    Jayson Lusk, a food and agricultural economist at Oklahoma State University, has written that in 1900, just less than 40% of the total U.S. population lived on farms, and 60% lived in rural areas. By the mid-2010s, about 1% lived on farms and 20% lived in rural areas. 

    “Young people leave the farm for better jobs and more money,” Hurt said. “They have been doing this since the 1870s.”

    As farming becomes more efficient, more food can be made from less land, Strom said.

    “I don’t know if I’d call that benign, as it requires greater inputs of chemicals and technology,” Strom said. “However, I don’t see it as a result of greater outsourcing of food production or any deliberate effort to undermine the U.S. farmer.”

    Our ruling

    Biden said, “Over the past four decades, we’ve lost over 400,000 farms in America (and) over 140 million acres of farmland. And that’s an area roughly equal to the size of Minnesota, North and South Dakota combined.”

    His numbers roughly track with legitimate data sources for farms, farmland and those three states.

    However, the definition of “farm” can be murky, and the lost farmland masks improvements in efficiency that meant more goods could be farmed from less land by fewer people.

    We rate the statement Mostly True.



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  • Fact Check: Despite Mike Johnson’s claim, some spending cuts can increase deficits

    Pending legislation for an emergency aid package to Israel includes a Republican provision that has become a source of contention: stripping $14.3 billion in funding from the Internal Revenue Service. 

    Republicans, including newly elected House Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., have hoped those savings would offset the aid to Israel, preventing any additions to the federal deficit.

    But the Congressional Budget Office, Congress’ nonpartisan number-crunching arm, disagreed, saying that cutting IRS funding would actually increase the deficit by $12.5 billion because reducing enforcement would, in turn, reduce revenue collections.  

    Johnson decried this logic during a Nov. 5 appearance on “Fox News Sunday.”

    “Look, only in Washington can you cut funding, add a pay-for to a new spending measure, and they say it’s terrible for the deficit,” he said.

    However, CBO has long used this method, and budget experts say it’s logical.

    CBO’s approach “may be counterintuitive, but it’s not weird,” said Marc Goldwein, senior vice president of the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, a think tank that tracks federal budget policy. “Talk to any business — sometimes when you cut spending, it costs money, because you’re cutting from something that makes them money. And administering the tax code makes the U.S. money.”

    Johnson’s office did not respond to an inquiry for this article. 

    The Republican bill to fund Israel

    A few weeks after the Oct. 7 Hamas attacks in Israel, the House Republican majority introduced the Israel Security Supplemental Appropriations Act, which would provide $14.3 billion for military assistance to Israel and for the return of American citizens in the region.

    The bill passed on a largely party-line vote of 226-196. 

    Most Democrats voted against it because they wanted to pass the Israel aid alongside military assistance for Ukraine. They also opposed the provision to strip the IRS of funding. 

    The IRS funding was part of $80 billion allocated for the agency to spend over 10 years. It was originally included in the Inflation Reduction Act, a bill signed by President Joe Biden in 2022 after being passed with only Democratic votes in the House and Senate.

    Backers of the Inflation Reduction Act said much of that money was intended to fill positions over the next decade after expected retirements among existing IRS staff. Analyses have shown that more than half the agency’s workforce is nearing retirement.

    An April 2023 IRS report said through the end of 2024, the IRS planned to fill roughly 20,000 positions, including customer service representatives, information technology experts and accountants. 

    Of those, about 7,000 new hires would focus on enforcement, and the report said that most of that enforcement would be targeted at wealthy taxpayers and big corporations, to forestall noncompliance that drains the treasury of expected tax dollars. 

    Republican critics of the 2022 IRS funding boost have argued that middle-income Americans would face a higher audit risk. However, top Treasury and IRS officials consistently confirmed that the new resources allocated to the IRS will be focused on audits of the highest-paying Americans. 

    Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen has said auditing corporations and people with high net worth requires staff with specialized skills. Prior to the funding boost, she said, the agency was able to audit only about 7,500 out of 4 million such returns annually.

    Why would cutting spending cost money?

    For the Israel aid bill, CBO — widely considered the gold standard for such calculations — concluded that rescinding the $14.3 billion from the IRS budget would decrease enforcement actions over the next decade and reduce revenue by $26.8 billion between 2024 and 2033. 

    With IRS funding reduced by $14.3 billion under the bill, but with IRS revenues projected to decrease by $26.8 billion, the net increase in the federal deficit, according to CBO, would be $12.5 billion.

    “CBO’s estimate makes great sense,” said Paul N. Van de Water, a senior fellow at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, a liberal think tank. “Although the estimates are uncertain, it’s logical that revenues will shrink if the IRS has less funding and fewer staff to enforce tax laws.”

    This is not the first time the CBO has made a similar calculation. The Democratic majority on the Senate Budget Committee released a memo Oct. 31 that cited four prior examples in 2023 in which the CBO rated a spending cut as increasing the deficit, all relating to proposed IRS cuts.

    Goldwein said this phenomenon is relatively rare, but not unprecedented. He recalled examples of cuts to anti-fraud enforcement budgets of other agencies such as the Social Security Administration being projected by the CBO to cost the government money.

    “Cutting IRS funding for savings is short-sighted and costs taxpayers in the end,” said Steve Ellis, president of another budget-focused group, Taxpayers for Common Sense. 

    Our ruling

    Johnson said, “Only in Washington can you cut funding, add a pay-for to a new spending measure, and they say it’s terrible for the deficit.” .

    The cuts Johnson references would be to the IRS’ enforcement budget, and the “pay-for” refers to cutting $14.3 billion on IRS spending to offset the $14.3 billion in aid to Israel.

    However, CBO’s longstanding practice has been to classify enforcement cuts as reducing revenue, which increases the deficit. The CBO projected that rescinding $14.3 billion from the IRS would decrease enforcement actions over the next decade and reduce revenue by $26.8 billion by 2033. 

    With IRS funding reduced by $14.3 billion, but with IRS revenues projected to decrease by $26.8 billion, the net increase in the federal deficit would be $12.5 billion.

    It’s also common for businesses to use the same methods when they cut expenditures on areas that generate revenue, experts said.

    We rate the statement False.



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  • Fact Check: United Facts of America: What experts say about the Trump trials and the 2024 election

    The 2024 presidential election may become the Courtroom Trial Election as former President Donald Trump splits his time between rallies and the defendant’s table. 

    During a Nov. 7 United Facts of America panel, PolitiFact explored the facts behind the trials Trump faces. Our guests were Palm Beach County State Attorney Dave Aronberg and Jon Sale, a white-collar criminal defense attorney in Miami. Sale is a former Watergate special prosecutor and a former lawyer for Rudy Giuliani.

    PolitiFact has fact-checked numerous false and misleading statements related to the 91 criminal charges against Trump.

    The charges against Trump have drawn opposing reactions from die-hard partisan voters, including liberals who want to see Trump in a jail jumpsuit and Trump loyalists who dismiss the cases as much ado about nothing.

    “I think both sides need to lower their expectations a little bit,” said Aronberg, a Democrat. As far as the idea of Trump going to jail “there is a possibility. But I think the only criminal case that will be decided before the election will be the Washington, D.C., election interference case.” 

    Here’s a look at some of our experts’ key points in the Trump cases.

    New York civil fraud case 

    Trump testified Nov. 6 in the New York civil fraud trial in which he’s accused of creating false valuations of his properties, including Mar-a-Lago in Palm Beach, Florida. In court, Trump’s outbursts and proclamations drew eye rolls and scoldings from the judge. 

    Aronberg said Trump’s testimony is not a harbinger for the criminal cases, predicting he won’t testify in those trials. 

    “He could be walking into a perjury trap and he’s not under no requirement to testify. But in a civil case, if he took the Fifth Amendment, it would be used as an adverse inference against him,” Aronberg said.

    Sale said that in the courtroom Trump made admissions that could be used against him. 

    “But in the political arena, to his audience, this was a big victory for him,” Sale said. “And I’ll bet you when you look at the fundraising statistics, when they come out, I think you’re going to see that this performance of his was a grand slam home run.”

    Trump’s claims that the cases are “election interference”

    Trump has falsely said that he was charged for trying to challenge an election’s outcome. One of his other common defenses is that the cases amount to “election interference” as he faces a possible rematch against President Joe Biden.

    “It’s easy for him to say that on the campaign trail,” Sale said. But to make a motion alleging prosecutorial misconduct would require “an evidentiary hearing and real proof of that, which they’re not going to have. So in the courtroom, none of this is going to be allowed.”

    Aronberg said that for people who think the cases signal a weaponized Justice Department, “Hunter Biden would like to have a word.” 

    U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland named David Weiss as a special prosecutor, a Trump administration holdover, to investigate Biden’s son Hunter.

    But Aronberg said it is “legitimate to criticize a slow process at the beginning” by prosecutors.

    PolitiFact has found no evidence that Special Counsel Jack Smith intentionally timed the charges to hamper Trump’s campaign as Trump alleged. Complex federal cases routinely take years to investigate before they reach the indictment stage. 

    And Trump announced his campaign in November 2022 — about two years before Election Day 2024.

    “It was Donald Trump who decided to announce for president extra early, earlier than any other candidate because he wanted to intimidate Merrick Garland, because he wanted to make this argument that he was being persecuted because he was running for president,” Aronberg said.

    Trump’s claim that the gag orders are violating his free speech rights

    When there is a gag order, usually judges gag only the lawyers because the lawyers’ clients tend to “keep their mouth shut,” Sale said.

    In the fraud civil trial underway in New York, Judge Arthur Engoron issued a gag order barring Trump from discussing communications with the judge’s staff. A federal appeals court earlier this month temporarily paused a separate gag order on Trump in the criminal 2020 election interference case.

    However, Trump as a presidential candidate “has the highest degree of protection under the First Amendment for free political speech.”

    The gag order in the federal case is “too broad,” said Sale, because Trump should be allowed to respond to witnesses, including former Trump administration Attorney General Bill Barr, who have gone on TV to criticize Trump. 

    Final thoughts about the Trump cases

    The Trump trials will dominate the election news coverage, offer plenty of fodder for comics and keep fact-checkers busy beyond Election Day in November 2024. But they are not cause for celebration, said Sale.

    After Trump was indicted in the adult film actress hush money case, James Comey, the former FBI director fired by Trump, tweeted “It’s been a good day.”

    “I couldn’t tell you how much I disagree with that,” Sale said. The fact that a former president was indicted ultimately “four times is not a great day for America. I think it’s a very sad and solemn day for America.”

    Sale said that “Trump, like everyone else, is entitled to a fair trial, where he’s presumed innocent, and he should be convicted or acquitted based upon getting a fair trial for our fair, unbiased jury.”

    WATCH: The legal campaign overhang: Election 2024 as Courtroom Trial Election?

    RELATED: Read all of PolitiFact’s coverage on Donald Trump indictments



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  • Fact Check: United Facts of America: What polling, focus groups tell us about 2024 voters

    Less than a year away from the 2024 election, political experts see two prevalent attitudes among American voters.

    Low enthusiasm among Democrats for President Joe Biden’s reelection.

    And Republicans’ unshakeable loyalty to former President Donald Trump.

    Although much could change in the coming months, PolitiFact got a peek into voters’ minds during two discussions at United Facts of America, PolitiFact and the Poynter Institute’s third annual fact-checking festival, which ends Nov. 8.

    Several Republican candidates remain in the running for the party’s nomination, but 2024 is shaping up to be a 2020 rematch. Trump, 77, and Biden, 80, are the front-runners for their respective parties. If either candidate wins, he would be the oldest person ever elected president.

    Right now, voters know what concerns they have with Biden — mainly his age and how he’s handled the economy — because as president he’s in the news spotlight daily. But voters aren’t seeing Trump as they used to, so their disapproval could be less apparent, experts said.

    Recent polling reflects this contrast. A New York Times/Siena College poll released Nov. 5 showed Trump leading Biden in most battleground states.

    ABC News Political Director Rick Klein said a poll is a “snapshot in time” and cautioned against giving polls too much credit this far out.

    “They can’t predict what their future mindset is going to be, what the future situation is going to be,” Klein said in a Nov. 6 interview. “People aren’t going around every day thinking about how Donald Trump did his job four years ago. They are thinking a lot more about how Joe Biden is doing his job now.”

    Sarah Longwell, who publishes the conservative news and opinion website The Bulwark, echoed this point in her Nov. 7 session. Longwell is well acquainted with voters’ sentiments as she regularly conducts online focus groups with voters across the country. She highlights these discussions on her podcast, “The Focus Group.”

    “There is this idea of frustration with Biden because he’s right in front of them, but people have forgotten what they hate about Donald Trump,” said Longwell, a Republican strategist who opposes Trump’s candidacy. “Trump is borderline invisible to most voters right now. Literally all they’re thinking about is, ‘I feel like the economy was better back then.’”

    The economy is consistently the top issue for voters, she said.

    “When you ask people about what matters to them, they’re going to tell you it’s their mortgage, it’s how much rent is,” Longwell said. “They know how much eggs and milk are.”

    When talking to a niche group Longwell calls “flipper backsliders” — people who voted for Trump in 2016, Biden in 2020 and who may vote for Trump again in 2024 — the economy was a sticking point. One person’s words, Longwell said, captured why many voters may choose Trump over Biden: “I’m going to turn off my TV, I’m gonna close my eyes and I’m just going to enjoy Trump’s economy.”

    Voters haven’t been persuaded by Democrats’ messaging on the economy, Longwell said. Democrats didn’t do enough to prove to voters why raising interest rates helped prevent a recession.

    “The Biden administration prematurely labeled things ‘Bidenomics’ before they won the debate over whether or not the economy is better now,” Longwell said. When Trump was president, she said Trump and other Republicans hammered home that “the economy was awesome.”

    Swing voters may choose to tune out aspects of Trump they don’t like, and focus on what they perceive as a better economic situation.

    PolitiFact’s reporting on the U.S. economy has found it is somewhere in between the narratives pushed by Republicans and Democrats. Inflation has dropped considerably since last year, but gasoline and grocery prices remain historically high.

    Election integrity is another major voter focus in the 2024 race. More than a majority of Republicans still believe Trump’s false narrative that the 2020 election was stolen. For these conservatives, the point is less about evidence of malfeasance, of which there is none, and more about a strongly held belief that the election was rigged, Longwell said.

    Longwell doesn’t see this majority as persuadable. She focuses instead on engaging with the roughly 30% of Republicans she views as “open and receptive to alternative messages.”

    “T​​hose are the ones who are looking at the Republican Party being like, ‘What is happening here? This is not what I thought I was getting into,’” Longwell said.

    RELATED: United Facts of America: How Russian falsehoods spread to U.S. through faux local news 

    RELATED: United Facts of America discusses the profit motive driving anti-vaccine misinformation



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  • Fact Check: United Facts of America: How Russian falsehoods spread to U.S. through faux local news

    After Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022, tech platforms enforced bans against Russian state media. But actors found ways to circumvent these bans and continue circulating Russian propaganda — often through websites posing local news.

    As part of PolitiFact’s United Facts of America, Peter Benzoni, investigative data and research analyst on the Alliance for Securing Democracy’s information manipulation team, spoke to  PolitiFact Executive Director Aaron Sharockman about the ways that Russia has influenced the U.S. media landscape.

    Through a process Benzoni described as “information laundering,” Russian-aligned forces move false or misleading information from a less credible sources to more credible ones, such as mainstream media outlets.

    “Information laundering” isn’t new, Benzoni said. In 1983, an operation of the former Russian secret police and intelligence agency, KGB, planted a story in a Soviet-funded New Delhi paper. It was a conspiracy theory that the U.S. manufactured HIV at a biological research center in Fort Detrick, Maryland. The allegations gained international traction, landing on the “CBS Evening News,” when anchor Dan Rather cited the claim and noted that the source offered “no hard evidence.”

    “You have this integration into the information ecosystem,” Benzoni said, “wherein enough traction is created and has gone through enough laundering that the information is successfully given legitimacy and treated as though it came from a legitimate source.” 

    In the digital era, Benzoni said information moves faster and reaches a wider audience than ever and often escapes scrutiny. That’s partly because it’s easy to create a website that looks legitimate — publishing one takes as little as “$20 and a WordPress subscription,” Benzoni said.

    In today’s digital ecosystem, he said, websites execute chains of citations, attributing the same information to different sources, leading to confusion about where information originated and making it hard to assess its authenticity. 

    “In some cases, this confusion is able to be exploited and result in the intentional obfuscation of the true starting point of information,” he said. “We have to be very cognizant of the tactics used to hide this information and realize that it’s used to make this disinformation appear more credible, or to avoid accountability.”

    How websites evade bans

    Benzoni outlined some of the ways that content from state media circumvents bans such as the EU’s suspension of access to Russia Today or RT.

    • Mirror and alternative sites that simply replicate the banned content. These are generally controlled by the original site.

    • Aggregators, sites that compile news from different sources and tend to link back to their original source.

    • Copy-and-paste sites that lift and republish content without verification or attribution. Content from state media will be lifted and republished to third-party websites — including the U.S. right-wing conspiracy-oriented website InfoWars — reaching a global audience. “So they’re able to spread misinformation as though it was news for you, produced by them,” he said.

    He said some sites will try to evade bans by frequently rotating or switching out domains. He described it as “digital Whac-a-Mole.” For example, analysts found 12 domains identical to RT, including some in different languages. The technique of switching out domains allows actors to bypass digital barriers, such as being blacklisted or being placed lower on Google Search results.

    Benzoni gave an example of an RT story that had its content almost completely lifted and republished by a site named, “Little Rock AR News.” An identical website, “Albuquerque Breaking News” also republished the RT story. He said a network of regional sites, national sites and faux local news sites targeting specific cities in the U.S. was eventually uncovered as these websites used the same set of registration information. 

    How can users detect these dubious sites? Benzoni shared a tool called The Disinformation Laundromat, a project by the Alliance for Securing Democracy, which people can use to discover linkages between websites through text matching and web forensics.

    Here’s how it works: Users can enter a piece of content to identify other websites that posted copies of that content. The tool can also show whether the website is likely linked to other websites by analyzing identifiers like its domain name and its unique ID linked to its Google AdSense or publisher account.

    Future detection challenges following the rise of AI

    The growth of artificial intelligence’s growth also poses challenges when it comes to identifying false websites, Benzoni said. 

    AI can be used to “clog up” detection systems, and can also be used to generate fake, but realistic, content, such as output generated from ChatGPT.

    AI models can generate content that modifies a singular source by rephrasing text or altering images, making similarity detection across sites harder. AI can also help create dynamic websites that frequently and automatically refresh website elements such as content and structure.

    Benzoni said that in the lead-up to the 2024 U.S. election, he expects forces that want to generate “undetectable news networks” to disseminate political messages will do so more easily given AI’s availability.

    “So, you’re able to borrow the legitimacy of local news sites to make a point that you could not otherwise make without being called out for it,” he said. “I think you’re gonna see a huge increase in volume and I think you’re gonna see a huge increase in the types of people using these dissemination networks.”

    RELATED: An illustrated guide to ‘pink slime’ journalism



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  • Fact Check: Altered videos appear to show Kelly Clarkson ‘Today’ show interview about weight

    A recent video appearing to show “Today” co-host Hoda Kotb interviewing singer Kelly Clarkson “about her weight loss journey” was altered, and follows another deepfake that made it look as though Clarkson was hawking diet pills. 

    She wasn’t, and this interview isn’t authentic either.

    In the altered video, Kotb appears to say Clarkson “lost 37 pounds in a short time.” 

    Clarkson, in a split screen, then appears to say: “Many know me from music but let me introduce myself. I am Kelly Clarkson. I’m 41 years old and I currently reside in New York City. I’ve lost a total of 37 pounds. Follow the link and read my interview.”

    An Oct. 31 Facebook post sharing the video 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.)

    This split screen isn’t authentic. It was created using two different moments. One, from March 2020, shows Kotb on a “Today” show in which she cried after interviewing now-retired Saints quarterback Drew Brees over the toll COVID-19 had wreaked on New Orleans, where she lived earlier in her career.

    The clip of Clarkson stems from an April 17 video she posted on Instagram about her new album, “Chemistry.” She said nothing about her age, weight or New York City.

    This supposed interview about Clarkson losing weight never happened. We rate this post False.

     



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  • Fact Check: United Facts of America discusses: the profit motive driving anti-vaccine misinformation

    As vaccine hesitancy rises and childhood vaccination rates fall, the real-world consequences of vaccine misinformation couldn’t be clearer: People will get sick. People will suffer.

    During a Nov. 6 United Facts of America discussion, Dr. Céline Gounder, KFF Health News’ senior fellow and public health editor and an epidemiologist and infectious disease specialist, warned that we’ve recently seen outbreaks of measles in Ohio and cases of polio in New York. 

    “These infections will come back and they are not benign infections,” Gounder told PolitiFact Deputy Editor Rebecca Catalanello. “There’s a reason scientists doctors decided to develop vaccines against some of these infections.” 

    People who get severe measles can develop severe — and sometimes deadly — pneumonia or encephalitis, a brain infection that can cause seizures and other neurological problems, Gounder said. Measles can also be deadly. Polio can paralyze and kill people. 

    Gounder said that despite vaccine mis- and disinformation’s potentially deadly stakes, there’s a strong profit motivation for people who spread it. 

    “The people who are purveying vaccine mis- and disinformation will then pivot from, ‘These vaccines don’t work,’ or, ‘These vaccines are harmful,’ to, ‘But hey, I have something that will work for you or that will help educate you more,’” Gounder said.

    Anti-vaccine activists such as Dr. Joseph Mercola, an osteopathic physician who spread misinformation about COVID-19 and the vaccines, “are all selling something at the end of the day,” she said. This can include anything from tickets to anti-vaccine conferences to herbals or supplemental products. “It is quite lucrative.” 

    Although anti-vaccine misinformation has been around since vaccines were created, Gounder said social media’s increasing influence and the COVID-19 pandemic changed the misinformation landscape. Technological advancements allowed anti-vaccine activists to efficiently monetize disinformation, she said. 

    The COVID-19 pandemic’s onset coincided with the 2020 U.S. presidential election, which meant that disease-prevention measures including COVID-19 vaccines became politicized. Gounder said this was predictable, and not unique to the U.S., pointing to the Ebola outbreak in West Africa in 2014. 

    “Several of the countries in the region had their own presidential elections at the time, and we saw the exact same thing happen,” Gounder said. “For example, ‘Ebola is a hoax,’ ‘COVID is a hoax.’ We saw the exact same language used in two entirely different settings.”

    Gounder, who has dedicated much of her professional life to health communication, has also experienced anti-vaccine mis- and disinformation following personal tragedy. Her husband, the soccer journalist Grant Wahl, died Dec. 10, 2022, and anti-vaccine conspiracy theorists exploited his death. 

    Gounder said she expected as much. She called exploiting a celebrity or public figure’s death to promote anti-vaccine narratives the “playbook” for people who spread such disinformation. 

    “Basically, right after I informed family of his passing, I felt like I had to kick into gear in getting him transported back to the U.S. as quickly as possible to have an autopsy as quickly as possible to get information out about what was his true cause of death as quickly as possible,” she said. “I knew that there would be rumors and conspiracy theories about his death.”

    Since the COVID-19 vaccines were first approved, PolitiFact has observed a similar pattern of misinformation, and has regularly debunked claims that athletes’ health incidents and that any number of sudden, unexplained deaths were linked to COVID-19 vaccines.

    @politifact “I think the most important thing is for people to understand what the playbook looks like.” Epidemiologist and infectious disease specialist Dr. Céline Gounder talks at United Facts of America about the real-world consequences of vaccine misinformation and how to fight such falsehoods. #vaccine #misinformation #health ♬ Astro Beat – Staysee

    When a celebrity dies, Gounder said, “you will start to hear these false claims.” You might also see people she described as “fake experts” — people who are not immunology or vaccine experts making claims that COVID-19 vaccines caused a person’s death. She also warned people to watch for logical fallacies. 

    “The most common one is probably A came before B, so, therefore, A must have caused B,” Gounder said. “But that would be like saying, ‘Well, I took the subway to work today, so, therefore, the subway must have killed me.’”

    The majority of the American population has received a COVID-19 vaccine, and knowing about these anti-vaccine misinformation maneuvers is an important way to combat them. It’s also important to stay positive, she said. 

    “The people who get things done are optimists,” Gounder said. “Part of what gives me optimism is optimism — is the fact that I and many of my friends and colleagues still have optimism that we can make a difference, because if you don’t, that’s when you’ve already given up and it’s really game over already.”

    RELATED: United Facts of America to feature top-flight voices on elections, AI, vaccines

    RELATED: How health incidents like Bronny James’ cardiac arrest fuel COVID-19 vaccine misinformation



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  • Fact Check: Cabral-Guevara says some Wisconsin child care providers’ rates are as low as $2.25 an hour

    Wisconsin lawmakers agree that the state’s child care industry is in crisis. But they are at odds on how to address it. 

    Republicans have introduced bills that would loosen regulations like staff-to-child ratios, which they say would give centers flexibility. 

    Democrats have pushed to continue pandemic-era Child Care Counts payments to providers, which help prevent tuition rate increases for parents. 

    During an Oct. 18,  hearing for the GOP bills, state Sen. Rachael Cabral-Guevara, R-Appleton, asked the state Department of Children and Families for solutions “besides just more money.”

    “I had some folks coming in and I was asking them, ‘Well, how much are you charging an hour for child care?’ And some of them told me, ‘$2. $2.25 an hour,’” she said. “And I said, ‘Well, maybe you need to increase your prices.’”

    (She added that not every provider charges $2 an hour.) 

    Still, Cabral-Guevara’s claim caught our attention. Especially after one recent report found that child care can cost more than tuition at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

    Could some providers in Wisconsin really be charging as little as $2 an hour for child care? Let’s take a look.

    Rates as low as $3 an hour in rural areas for older kids

    When asked to back up the claim, Cabral-Guevara’s chief-of-staff, Ryan Retza, followed up with the meeting organizer to get more details on the attendees. 

    He also shared a 2022 Department of Children and Families study that showed price ranges based on the child’s age, the type of care and whether the area was rural or urban. 

    He pointed us to a line in a table that represented children in the 6-and-older age group, in child care that is normally operated out of a provider’s home, and in the most rural parts of the state. The corresponding weekly rate was as low as $120, or $3 an hour for 40 hours of child care a week. That’s not quite as low as $2 or $2.25, but it’s somewhat close. 

    Department of Children and Families communications director Gina Paige told us that a single provider might not charge that amount, but it’s possible that the $120 is “a composite of multiple providers’ prices.”

    Paige noted that “provider prices vary substantially across Wisconsin,” and urban areas, group centers and infant care are more expensive. 

    “Providers are often not charging families for the true cost of care because they know families cannot afford it,” she added. 

    But back to Cabral-Guevara: Are there any providers charging even less than $3 that could prove her claim?

    Based on other information, it’s possible, at least in some counties.

    Documentation shows Winnebago County providers may charge that little

    In a later email, Retza said “we have not pinpointed the specific individual Sen. Cabral-Guevara spoke to in April.” 

    So, we don’t know the specific provider she was referring to. But her office checked with a local child care resource and referral center in Kimberly, which was also at the meeting. That agency shared information on rates at group centers and family homes in eight Fox Valley counties in November 2022. 

    Retza pointed to Winnebago County, where weekly rates at group centers can be as low as $90 for children 5 and over, or $2.25 per hour. That assumes the calculation is based on a 40-hour work week, though the report doesn’t specify. 

    Another table for Winnebago County — with less data filled in — shows a $9 hourly rate for that older age group in that type of care. 

    That’s the highest hourly rate of all the counties, age groups and types of care. And many counties had missing hourly rate data, suggesting it might not be as reliable. 

    But again, Cabral-Guevara was referring to an exceptionally low rate she heard about, and that $90 weekly rate fits her recollection.  

    Our ruling

    Cabral-Guevara said in the October hearing that some individuals or businesses in Wisconsin are charging $2 or $2.25 an hour for child care.

    She wasn’t able to point to a specific provider, and the data has a bit of uncertainty involved. But it’s still feasible that a provider in her district is charging $2.25 an hour, based on data from the referral agency.

    And although she acknowledged not all providers charge that little, she also didn’t specify the age or type or care, which impacts prices. 

    Our definition of Mostly True is “The statement is accurate but needs clarification or additional information.” That fits here.



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  • Fact Check: Video of bomb strike on crowd is from Sudan conflict, not Israel-Hamas war

    A chilling video shared on social media shows a bomb falling from overhead and landing amid people huddled near large white tanks. The bomb explodes into a fireball; black smoke rises and people scatter.

    The video is real, but it’s being falsely presented as an example of Israel attacking Palestinian civilians in the country’s war with Hamas. The video is from Sudan and shows a conflict there.

    “Israel attacks a bunch of Palestinian kids who were trying to get some water to drink with a bomb,” read a caption on an Oct. 22 TikTok video. The caption continued, “Killing innocent civilians is not self-defense.”

    We found other users sharing the same video and making a similar claim on TikTok, X and Facebook.

    TikTok identified this video as part of its efforts to counter inauthentic, misleading or false content. (Read more about PolitiFact’s partnership with TikTok.)

    (Screenshot from TikTok)

    The social media posts continue a trend of people sharing videos they falsely claim are from the Israel-Hamas war since the conflict began Oct. 7.

    Using a reverse-image search, we traced the video to an Oct. 12 Facebook post from news outlet Al Jazeera Sudan. A headline and caption with the post, translated into English by Google Translate, reads, “A Sudanese army march bombed a fuel tanker belonging to the Rapid Support Forces in Khartoum.”

    We found the same video on the X account of Sudan News, also on Oct. 12. That post, translated using Google, described the video as “An army march targeting a group of Rapid Support militia mercenaries, who gathered to refuel their motorcycles.”

    The video was also posted on Rumble, a conservative-leaning U.S. news site, by an account called Real Combat Footage, which described it as a “Sudanese drone strike.”

    The Sudanese army and the Rapid Support Forces, a paramilitary group, have been fighting for power since April, according to news reports. The two sides are said to be resuming U.S. and Saudi Arabia-led peace talks, Reuters reported Oct. 26.

    The TikTok video shows three large white tanks near where the bomb is dropped. We found images of white tanks in a similar formation on another website article about explosions at a fuel depot in the Sudanese capital Khartoum in April.

    We searched Google Maps for “fuel depot” and “Khartoum” and found a jet fuel depot near Khartoum International Airport with four white tanks aligned similarly to the ones in the TikTok video.

    It’s unclear when the video was shot; we asked Al Jazeera for more information about it and didn’t immediately hear back. But the video does not show Israel bombing Palestinian children trying to get water.

    We rate the claim False.



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  • Fact Check: No, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy hasn’t surrendered to Russia

    More than 20 months into the Russia-Ukraine war, social media users are claiming the fighting has suddenly stopped.

    A Nov. 4 Instagram post shared a screenshot of an X post with a black-and-white photo of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy. Text above the photo read, “Zelensky has surrendered. Ukraine has fallen. Israel is next.”

    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.)

    (Screengrab from Instagram)

    The original post on X was flagged by the social media platform’s Community Notes feature, which allows readers to add brief context to posts they view as misleading.

    There is no evidence that Zelenskyy has ordered the Ukrainian military to surrender to Russia, and we found no credible reports supporting this claim.

    This is not the first time a claim like this has spread. In March 2022, less than one month after Russia began its invasion, a deepfake video of Zelenskyy calling for Ukrainian troops to lay down their weapons circulated online.

    Zelenskyy himself has rejected the idea of conceding to Russia. In a December 2022 address to the U.S. Congress, Zelenskyy said, “Ukraine holds its lines and will never surrender.”

    News outlets worldwide continue to report on the Russia-Ukraine war’s developments, and there have been no signs of either side surrendering. On Nov. 5, Zelenskyy dismissed suggestions that the war had reached a stalemate, NBC News reported.

    We rate the claim that Zelenskyy has surrendered False.



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