Category: Fact Check

Roseanne Barr supports former President Donald Trump in the 2024 election. Tim Allen attended Trump’s presidential inauguration. And Kurt Russell has identified himself as a “hardcore libertarian.” 

But these actors didn’t form a “non-woke actors alliance,” as a recent Facebook post claims. 

“Kurt Russell forms a new non-woke actors alliance with Roseanne Barr and Tim Allen,” an Aug. 27 Facebook post said. 

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, Instagram and Threads.)

Representatives for Russell and Barr didn’t immediately respond to PolitiFact’s questions about the post, but we found no evidence that it’s true. Efforts to reach Allen were also unsuccessful.

The statement was lifted without context from a self-described satire site. The post featured a link to a blog that repasted a June 29 story from SpaceXMania without giving the website credit. SpaceXMania describes its mission as bringing readers the “freshest fake news.”

We found no credible evidence, such as authentic news stories or statements from the actors, that this claim is real. 

We rate it False.

 

Arizona has one of the nation’s largest populations of older residents, so it makes sense that Social Security might be a hot topic in the swing state’s contested Senate race.

In her bid to replace retiring Sen. Kyrsten Sinema, I-Ariz., Republican Kari Lake said her Democratic competitor aims to cut people’s federal retirement benefits if he’s elected.

“Kamala & Walz and Ruben Gallego want to cut your Social Security. I won’t let them,” Lake wrote Aug. 8 on X, aligning U.S. Rep. Ruben Gallego, D-Ariz., with Democratic presidential nominee Vice President Kamala Harris and her running mate, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz.

Gallego is a former U.S. Marine who was elected to Congress in 2015 after serving several years as a state lawmaker in Arizona. Lake is a former local television news anchor who gained a national profile in 2022, when she ran for Arizona governor, lost to Democrat Katie Hobbs and falsely claimed the election was stolen.

Lake’s X post linked to an Aug. 8 Fox News article about comments Walz made in 2010; the article did not mention Gallego. When we asked Lake’s campaign for evidence, it sent a statement saying Lake will protect Social Security and attacking Gallego over inflation. Our review of Gallego’s record and campaign statements surfaced no evidence that supports Lake’s assertion that Gallego wants to cut Social Security.

For this check, we focused on Gallego’s position, but Harris and Walz have vowed to protect Social Security. As Minnesota’s governor, Walz in 2023 signed into law a state tax exemption for Social Security. As a California senator in 2019, Harris co-sponsored the Social Security Expansion Act in the Senate with Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., which would have increased Social Security benefits.

Gallego on Social Security

PolitiFact found Gallego has a record of voting to increase Social Security benefits and he recently introduced legislation to increase benefits based on cost-of-living metrics.

Gallego in April co-sponsored Boosting Benefits and COLAs for Seniors Act, which would change how Social Security is calculated to adjust for cost of living if passed.

Richard Johnson, a Social Security expert at the Urban Institute, a nonpartisan social policy research think tank, said the bill’s proposal to expand cost-of-living adjustments, often abbreviated as COLAs, would make Social Security better reflect real-world costs.

“The impact of that accumulates over time, so it really adds up for long-term beneficiaries — let’s say people in their 80s — who tend to struggle more financially than younger retirees,” Johnson said.

Gallego also joined 175 Democratic Congress members to introduce the Social Security 2100 Act in 2023 to increase benefits. The proposed legislation, which would hike benefits by 2%, was referred to a subcommittee, but has not received a vote.

The bill proposed several detailed changes to how benefits are calculated for different recipients. Johnson said the Social Security 2100 Act would significantly expand Social Security across the board.

In Congress, Gallego has voted for bills that advocate for older Americans, including the Protecting Older Workers Against Discrimination Act in 2021. He also denounced a Senate Republican plan in 2022 that the liberal nonprofit the National Committee to Preserve Social Security and Medicare said would jeopardize Medicare and Social Security.

Organizations that advocate for Social Security and represent older people, including Arizona Alliance for Retired Americans and the National Committee To Preserve Social Security and Medicare, have backed Gallego.

During a January 2023 MSBC appearance, Gallego spoke about Social Security.

“We’re not going to cut Social Security, we’re not going to cut future Social Security,” he said.

A review of Gallego’s X account, @RubenGallego, also shows statements he made about protecting Social Security.

Our ruling

Lake said on X that “Kamala & Walz and Ruben Gallego want to cut your Social Security.”

We found no information to support this claim.

Lake provided no evidence to support her claim; her post linked to an article that did not mention Gallego. Gallego vocally opposed cutting Social Security. In Congress, he has introduced several pieces of legislation aimed at making the costs of Social Security transparent and raising benefits.

He is also backed by groups, such as the Arizona Alliance for Retired Americans and the National Committee To Preserve Social Security and Medicare, that advocate for expanding Social Security.

His campaign said he does not want to decrease Social Security benefits if elected to the Senate in November.

We found no evidence to support Lake’s claim and much to contradict it. We rate this claim False.

A video of Canadian celebrity psychologist Jordan Peterson appears to show him making disparaging remarks about Chinese cuisine.

“I am not eating Chinese food again because they literally put rats in it,” he seems to say in an Aug. 25 Facebook video. “I am talking like 25 pound rats, like they shouldn’t be alive at all and they are mixed into the chicken and given to you.”

The Facebook 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, Threads, and Instagram.)

Peterson never said this. A close examination of the video shows that Peterson’s mouth movements don’t match the words in the audio.

The footage of Peterson is from a July 25 interview on the Joe Rogan Experience podcast. The show’s transcript shows Peterson never discussed Chinese food or rats.

The voice-over is close to Peterson’s voice, but it did not match his natural speaking timbre heard in other interviews and speeches. The dubbed voice-over appears to have been produced using artificial intelligence: We used Parrot AI, a tool which includes an AI model of Peterson’s voice and other celebrities’, and it produced two similar voice-overs.

The Facebook video directed viewers to purchase a book promoting herbal tablets. The video’s rodent remarks reflect racist tropes about Asian cuisine.

Fact-checkers at LeadStories debunked a similar video from a different Facebook account claiming to show Peterson telling viewers not to eat certain foods including popcorn, crabs and pork. That video also promoted the same book about herbal tablets.

We found no evidence on Peterson’s website and social media accounts that he promotes a book on herbal tablets. We contacted Peterson for comment but received no reply. 

We rate the claim that this video shows Peterson making disparaging remarks about Chinese food  Pants on Fire!

An Aug. 24 Instagram post sounded alarms about the impending demise of a huge chunk of the world’s population. 

In 2025, the post said, 6 million humans — nearly three quarters of the world’s total population in 2024 — will die. Its source? A supposed document from the World Economic Forum. 

“WEF document confirms 6 billion humans will die in 2025,” read the post.

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.)

We found an article with the same headline published Aug. 22 on The People’s Voice, a website known for spreading misinformation. We’ve repeatedly fact-checked the site’s false headlines, and the byline, Baxter Dmitry, is often on misinformation sites.

(Screenshot from Instagram)

The article took the claim a step further, saying, “A World Economic Forum report hiding in plain sight confirms that upwards of six billion people will die in 2025.” 

However, the article does not identify or link to any World Economic Forum document that meets that description. The World Economic Forum is an international not-for-profit organization that encourages cooperation between political, business, academic and other leaders. 

PolitiFact contacted the World Economic Forum, but did not immediately receive a response.

The People’s Voice article claimed that the website Deagel.com — a site that does not appear to identify its ownership and calls itself a “guide to military equipment and civil aviation,” with information sourced from sites including some owned by Russian state government — predicted the 6 billion deaths, linking only to an Internet Archive version of the 2025 forecast, which the article said had been removed from Deagel.com “sometime in 2020.” 

Deagel.com’s forecast predicted falling population totals for many countries, including the U.S., which it said would decrease from 326.6 million people to 99.5 million people. However, the archived site does not cite a time frame for its prediction. 

At the bottom of the archived Deagel.com page, a note says, “There is a tiny part of data coming from a variety of shadow sources such as Internet gurus, unsigned reports and others. … We assume that the official data, especially economic, released by governments is fake, cooked or distorted in some degree.”

The note also said, “Take into account that the forecast is nothing more than a model whether flawed or correct.”

The People’s Voice weaved a winding and uncorroborated tale linking Deagel.com to the World Economic Forum. 

Currently, the world’s population is 8.2 billion people. We found no reputable news organizations or credible information showing that a World Economic Forum document “confirm(ed) 6 billion humans” — or over 70% of the world’s population — will die in 2025.

We rate this claim Pants on Fire! 

PolitiFact Researcher Caryn Baird contributed to this report.

A recent Facebook post purports to show a series of video clips of the destruction wrought by an “earthquake in Taiwan.” 

The video features dark billowing clouds of debris and buildings crumbling set to an audio track that’s been used in TikTok videos that have been altered to show people, animals and buildings magically materializing in clouds. 

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, Instagram and Threads.)

The video includes a shot of a building damaged in April in Hualien, Taiwan, in the biggest earthquake to hit the country in 25 years.

But the rest of the footage appears to show controlled demolitions in China several years ago and a 2020 eruption in Indonesia, when Mount Sinabung spewed thousands of feet of volcanic material into the sky. 

We rate claims that this video shows buildings crumbling because of an earthquake in Taiwan False.

Republican politicians from multiple states say noncitizen voting is rampant and they are doing whatever they can to stop it.

U.S. Sen. Rick Scott, R-Fla., wants lawmakers to vote on a federal bill that aims to prevent noncitizen voting. Congress blocked noncitizens from voting in federal elections in 1996.

“Illegals SHOULD NOT BE VOTING in American elections,” Scott wrote Aug. 28 on X, linking to a clip of an interview with Newsmax. “This month alone, more than 16,000 non-citizens have been removed from the voter rolls in 3 states. It’s a serious problem — and as the next Senate GOP Leader I’ll make sure we fix it.”

Scott, who is running for reelection this year, wants to replace Sen. Mitch McConnell of Kentucky as the Senate Republican leader.

Despite evidence that noncitizen voting is rare, Republicans and social media influencers are making it a cornerstone of their election-year messaging.

Scott’s Senate office confirmed that he was referring to voters in Texas, Virginia and Alabama. 

We found that Scott’s number has some merit, but he misconstrued some of the details:

• Scott said the removals happened in August. Republican state officials in these states announced their actions only this month. Texas and Virginia officials said they had been removed during the past few years. 

• Scott used the word “removed.” Texas and Virginia officials said they removed the voters. But Alabama moved them from active to inactive status. Alabama’s secretary of state said some of the people might have since become naturalized citizens and are therefore eligible to vote if they update their information. 

• Texas called the voters “potential noncitizens.”

• It’s unclear how many of the 16,000 people voted in an election The voters flagged for citizenship questions add up to less than 1% of those states’ voter rolls.

Texas, Virginia and Alabama state officials have been looking for noncitizens on voter rolls

Here is what we know about the efforts to remove noncitizen voters in three states: 

Texas: Republican Gov. Greg Abbott said Aug. 26 that the state removed about 1 million ineligible people from the voter rolls since 2021. Most of them were removed because they had died or moved or didn’t respond to notices sent by election officials. 

Additionally, Abbott wrote, “of the over 6,500 potential noncitizens removed from the voter rolls, approximately 1,930 have a voter history.” Those 1,930 were sent to the state attorney general for potential legal action. The word “potential” raises the question about whether they were proved to be noncitizens.

The Dallas Morning News, a PolitiFact Texas partner, reported that those 6,500 people were sent a notice that their voter registration was under examination but did not respond. The notice states that they had 30 days to provide information or documentation establishing their qualifications for voter registration.

A previous effort to clean up Texas’ voter rolls went poorly in 2019 when the state started with an error-filled list of 95,000 potential noncitizens on the voter rolls. The effort led to lawsuits and the secretary of state’s resignation. This time, Texas’ list is much smaller.

Alabama: Republican Secretary of State Wes Allen said in an Aug. 13 statement that his office identified “3,251 individuals who are registered to vote in Alabama who have been issued noncitizen identification numbers by the Department of Homeland Security.” Allen did not say how many voted.

Allen instructed county boards of registrars to change the status for those voters to inactive and begin removing noncitizens from the rolls. Allen sent the list to the state’s attorney general for potential prosecution.

Allen said it’s possible that some of the people have since become naturalized citizens and are therefore eligible to vote; but they have to update their information.

Barry Stephenson, chairman of Jefferson County’s Board of Registrars, told PolitiFact his county had 557 voters on that list. 

“They are not being removed — they are moving from active status to inactive,” Stephenson said. As long as they fill out the form attesting to their citizenship, they can vote.

Stephenson told PolitiFact that a couple of people who received a notice called the office and said that they had green cards and didn’t know they were registered to vote. They said they never asked to register to vote while getting a driver’s license.

Jefferson County has 47,000 people on the inactive list, so the names the state flagged for citizenship are a small slice. 

Virginia: Republican Gov. Glenn Youngkin said in an Aug. 7 executive order that the state removed 6,303 noncitizens from voter rolls from January 2022 to July 2024. Youngkin’s order did not say whether any people cast ballots. Virginia used state Department of Motor Vehicles records and federal Department of Homeland Security data to identify noncitizens. Youngkin’s order stated that they may have “purposefully or accidentally registered to vote.”

Voting by noncitizens is rare

Elections experts say it is possible for an ineligible voter to accidentally register to vote at the DMV, which could be a mistake by the applicant or the clerk. And it’s possible DMV records on citizenship are outdated.

“All they know is what your citizenship status was whenever you interacted with the DMV,” said Jonathan Diaz, an election law expert at the Campaign Legal Center, which promotes voting access. (The center has sent letters to Alabama and Texas officials challenging their recent actions.)  

Anthony Gutierrez, executive director of Common Cause Texas, agreed with Diaz: “The fact that a voter was, at some point, not a citizen, certainly does not mean they voted during the time they were not a citizen.”

In 1996, Congress banned noncitizen voting in federal elections as part of a broader toughening of penalties on people in the country illegally. “Noncitizens” includes people legally and illegally in the U.S.

Safeguards already exist to prevent noncitizen voting. When people register to vote, they attest that they are citizens. Think tanks, academics, courts and journalists have analyzed claims about noncitizen voting at least since 2016 and have found only sporadic cases that wouldn’t swing federal elections. Penalties for noncitizen voting can include jail time, deportation or denial of citizenship applications. 

One of the largest examples we could find of noncitizens charged for voting stems from North Carolina. In 2020, federal prosecutors charged 19 people in North Carolina with voter fraud after they cast ballots mostly in the 2016 election. Sixteen people pleaded guilty, mostly to misdemeanors related to voting as a noncitizen. Three cases were dismissed. 

More than 4.5 million people in North Carolina voted in the 2016 presidential election.

State election officials routinely take steps to remove ineligible people from the voter rolls in accordance with federal law. 

It could take several months or longer for authorities to determine whether any of the people the three states found on the voter rolls will face criminal charges. Additional information about these efforts could come out in potential lawsuits, meaning it could be years before some unknowns about the current removals are answered.

Our ruling

Scott said, “This month alone, more than 16,000 non-citizens have been removed from the voter rolls in 3 states.” 

Scott is talking about something that did happen, but there is a lot we don’t know about the 16,000 total from available information. The outcome of investigations and potential lawsuits could take months or years. 

Based on what we know, Scott’s timeframe is off. Not all of these voters were taken off the rolls in August. State officials announced actions related to these voters in August. Texas announced it had removed 6,500 “potential noncitizens” since 2021. The word “potential” leaves some wiggle room. Virginia said it had “removed” 6,303 voters since 2022. 

The names in Alabama — 3,251 — were moved from active to inactive status, but that’s not the same as being removed. They can still vote as long as they sign a form attesting that they are U.S. citizens.

Being on the voter rolls and casting a ballot are not the same thing. We don’t know how many of the potential noncitizen voters cast ballots; Texas said 1,930 had a Texas voter history. When we add up the numbers on the lists in the three states, it amounts to less than 1% of registered voters. 

The statement is partially accurate but leaves out important details or takes things out of context. We rate it Half True.

RELATED: Trump’s claim that millions of immigrants are signing up to vote illegally is Pants on Fire!

RELATED: ‘An environment of distrust’: How Elon Musk amplifies falsehoods about immigration, 2024 voting

RELATED: Mike Johnson’s false claim about noncitizens registering to vote at DMV, ‘welfare’ offices

 

A social media post shared a graphic that appeared to come from Fox Business, highlighting items in Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz’s agenda as the Democratic nominee for vice president.

“Fox News doing their best to make Walz look cool,” the Aug. 25 Facebook photo’s text read. It attached a graphic, which read:

“Tim Walz’s Communist Agenda

(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.)

The image was altered. A Fox Business spokesperson told PolitiFact this image did not air on Fox Business Network.

It was shared in an Aug. 7 Reddit post and labeled as “satire,” but subsequently spread across social media without the label.

The Aug. 7 episode of “Mornings with Maria Bartiromo” did include a graphic titled “Tim Walz’s Economic Scorecard,” that looked similar to the altered one. But the real graphic contained a different list than the one in the Facebook post. 

We rate the claim that this image shows a Fox Business graphic titled “Tim Walz’s Communist Agenda” False.

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis tried to distance himself from a controversial proposal to build golf courses and hotels in state parks, saying he didn’t approve the proposals before they were “leaked.”

“It was not approved by me, I never saw that,” DeSantis said at an Aug. 28 news conference in Winter Haven. “They’re going back to the drawing board. … They’re not doing anything this year. They’re going to go back and basically listen to folks. A lot of that stuff was half-baked and was not ready for prime time. And it was intentionally leaked out to a left-wing group to try to create a narrative.”

The proposal for some state parks sparked outrage among residents. DeSantis made it sound as if the “half-baked” plan was leaked before it was ready. But the department’s attempted public rollout shows this was a proposal in its final stages.

The state published its full plans on a government website alongside an announcement for simultaneous public meetings across Florida within a matter of days. Officials in the governor’s office showed support of the plan at first, and state officials made a series of social media graphics touting it.

The Tampa Bay Times broke the story about the state park plans Aug. 20, and some of the details had been leaked to the outlet days earlier. By the time the story published, however, the Florida Department of Environmental Protection had already issued a press release and planned public meetings.

The department’s Aug. 19 news release said its 2024-25 “Great Outdoors Initiative” would “expand public access, increase outdoor activities and provide new lodging options.”

The next day the department uploaded proposals to its website for the nine parks.

The proposed plans included building golf courses, pickleball courts, disc golf courses and hotels in the parks. Multiple golf courses were pitched for Jonathan Dickinson State Park in Martin County and 350-room hotels were proposed for Anastasia State Park in St. Augustine and TopSail Hill Preserve State Park in Santa Rosa Beach. 

The Florida Department of State sent a notification Aug. 20 announcing plans to hold Aug. 27 public meetings about the proposed plans across the state. The department advertised the initiative on its social media accounts starting Aug. 19.

News of the proposed plans drew condemnation from both Republican and Democratic politicians and sparked protests throughout the state.

The department canceled the public meetings and withdrew the plans for golf courses at Jonathan Dickinson State Park.

The Tampa Bay Times wrote its first story Aug. 20 and has published a series of follow-up reports. In its first story, the newspaper reported it had obtained copies of leaked documents detailing the proposed plans and wrote that the leaked documents had circulated more broadly, sparking discussion on social media.

DeSantis’ comments at the Aug. 28 news conference reversed his administration’s initial defense of the initiative in an Aug. 22 statement to the Times. 

“Teddy Roosevelt believed that public parks were for the benefit and enjoyment of the people, and we agree with him,” spokesperson Jeremy Redfern told the newspaper. “No administration has done more than we have to conserve Florida’s natural resources, grow conservation lands, and keep our environment pristine. But it’s high time we made public lands more accessible to the public.”

On Aug. 29, in response to PolitiFact’s questions about DeSantis’ saying the proposals were unapproved and leaked, Redfern said, “the governor’s comments speak for themselves.”

The governor appoints the secretary of Florida’s Department of Environmental Protection. Statewide initiatives by the agency are typically vetted and approved by the governor’s office before being shared with the public.

Eric Draper, who served as Florida’s state parks director from 2017 to 2021, said typically the state’s Department of Environmental Protection secretary has conversations directly with the governor’s office. Sometimes it’s with the governor’s policy chief of environmental affairs, or it may be with the chief of staff, he said.

“Either way, these initiatives are run by the governor’s office, if not started at the governor’s office,” Draper said. “The department doesn’t do anything, in terms of initiatives, without getting some direction from them.”

PolitiFact contacted the agency about its communications with the governor’s office but didn’t receive a response by publication.

Our ruling

DeSantis said the environmental protection agency’s proposal to put golf courses, hotels in Florida state parks “was something that was leaked. … a lot of that stuff was half-baked and was not ready for prime time.”

DeSantis’ remarks leave the impression that the proposed plan to convert state parkland into other uses was just an idea on the chalkboard in its initial stages and leaked prematurely. 

But the initiative to build golf courses, pickleball courts, disc golf courses, hotels and more in Florida’s state parks was not just an undeveloped idea. There were plans, documents and public meetings scheduled simultaneously across the state.

This came to the public’s attention as a plan in its final stages that was first reported on publicly by the Tampa Bay Times, and it was later acknowledged and promoted by an agency DeSantis oversees as governor. The Times received tips for its reporting, but it didn’t report on the leaked documents until the state announced the initiative was forthcoming.

DeSantis’ statement contains an element of truth but ignores critical facts that would give a different impression. We rate it Mostly False.

What looks like a CNN breaking news segment about car insurance for veterans is drawing attention on social media, but maybe not the attention the account posting the video hoped for. 

“Scam,” many comments said. 

The video in the Aug. 18 Facebook post features CNN’s logo and a “breaking news” chyron that says: “Veterans are cancelling their auto insurance and doing this instead.”

“As a veteran, I qualified for the 2024 Veteran & Military Monetary Relief Plan AND apparently you can use it to cut down on your auto insurance,” the post said. “All I did to qualify was to tap the button below, answer a quick questionnaire, and they got me the same coverage at almost $1,600 less per year!”

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, Instagram and Threads.)

We saw no button to click to “answer a quick questionnaire,” but some people commenting on the post reported that it yielded only phone calls and quotes from major insurers. 

The video itself is altered. The audio is out of sync with the person supposedly talking in the video. No such story exists on CNN’s website. And the network spells canceling with one L, not two, as the word appears in the purported chyron. 

We rate claims this is an authentic CNN segment False.