Category: Fact Check

North Carolina legislators are considering legislation that critics say would ban wearing respirators or other masks in public for health reasons — but allow groups such as the Ku Klux Klan to wear face coverings.

“Thought the North Carolina mask ban couldn’t get any worse? Buckle up!” read a May 14 post on X, formerly Twitter, adding: The bill “has specific carve outs for entities like the KKK to continue wearing hoods in public.” 

More than 172,000 people saw the post and nearly 400 accounts shared it, according to X’s metrics. 

The post could give people the impression that North Carolina legislators are going out of their way to grant new freedoms to groups like the KKK. That’s not the case.

About the bill

This spring, North Carolina legislators introduced a bill to prevent lawbreakers from getting away with crimes by covering their faces. The bill passed the state House of Representatives less than a month after students at UNC-Chapel Hill wore masks while protesting Israel’s continued attacks on Gaza. 

A law enacted during the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020 allowed North Carolinians to wear masks in public to protect their health. House Bill 237 would strike that language from the law. The bill would also increase a defendant’s misdemeanor or felony charge by one criminal class if they’re found guilty of committing a crime while also wearing a mask.

Legal experts disagree over whether the bill’s language would make it illegal for people to wear a mask for health reasons.

Supporters of the bill say its intent is clear — to prevent people from trying to conceal their faces and identities while committing a crime —  while critics point out it would delete a legal provision allowing people to wear masks for health reasons. The proposal doesn’t explicitly allow for health-related masking under the part of the bill that lists exemptions, critics say.

That brings us to the allegation about the KKK. The person who posted the claim about “carve outs for entities like the KKK” didn’t respond to a request for comment.

Republicans, Democrats and the American Civil Liberties Union of North Carolina told PolitiFact they disagree over how existing laws apply to the KKK. But all agreed that the proposed bill does not introduce any new mask rights for the KKK or similar groups. 

Existing mask laws 

For decades, North Carolina has banned people from wearing masks in public. State law says that nobody over the age of 16 can be on public properties — such as roads, sidewalks or alleys — while trying to conceal their identity with a mask, hood or device. 

At the same time, the law has allowed for a few exemptions: Holiday costumes and masks used in theatrical productions, for instance, are OK. 

Existing law also allows an exception for members of societies that use masks, hoods or disguises as part of a “parade, ritual, initiation, ceremony, celebration.” Because House Bill 237 leaves that portion of the current law intact, some legislators believe it will continue to allow for demonstrations by the KKK.

Republican state Senate leader Phil Berger’s office argued that the KKK is effectively banned by a collection of laws passed in the 1950s. Legislators in 1953 banned “secret societies” whose purpose is to violate state laws or who assemble while their members are illegally armed. 

Other state laws ban people from holding meetings while wearing hoods, wearing hoods on someone else’s property, and burning crosses in public places or on any property that’s not their own without permission. 

The laws are meant to target the KKK, as PolitiFact NC has previously reported. 

However, enforcement of the existing laws has been lax, said state Sen. Sydney Batch, D-Wake. Batch said there were no major legal repercussions for KKK members who protested in Hillsborough without a permit in 2019 or masked members of the Proud Boys extremist group who disrupted a New Hanover County School board meeting last year. 

Also, legal experts for the American Civil Liberties Union of North Carolina see an opening in North Carolina’s laws that could allow the KKK to demonstrate so long as they do so peacefully and with permission. 

State law only bans secret societies whose purpose is to “violate or circumvent the law,” said Reighlah Collins, a policy lawyer for the state ACLU chapter. That narrow provision is key, she said.

“As long as a representative of the KKK gets permission from the municipality or County Commissioners where the parade/ceremony/etc takes place, then they would be able to wear hoods/masks in public pursuant to the exception,” Collins said. 

Still, she said, claims about carve outs for the KKK in House Bill 237 are misleading.

“Laws about secret societies and prohibited secret societies and masks have been on the books since the ’50s,” Collins said. “These are not new provisions that specifically are intended to protect the KKK.”

Our ruling

The social media post said a North Carolina bill “has specific carve outs for entities like the KKK to continue wearing hoods in public.”

House Bill 237 does not mention the KKK at all and does not introduce any new exemption or “carve out” for similar groups to wear hoods in public. 

Existing state laws may allow the KKK to demonstrate while wearing masks and House Bill 237 leaves that law intact. However, legal experts disagree over the effect of that existing provision and whether it prohibits the organization from gathering.

The social media post contains an element of truth but ignores critical facts that would give a different impression. That’s our definition of Mostly False.

Media reports that Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito’s house displayed an upside-down American flag, a traditional sign of political dissent, after the storming of the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, set off a firestorm of criticism over whether the move was a political statement that compromises his impartiality. 

Hanging the flag upside down is technically against U.S. law. But legal experts say Alito likely did not act illegally.

The initial May 16 New York Times article reported that the upside-down flag, a longstanding sign to communicate distress in “instances of extreme danger to life or property,” was by then a common symbol for supporters of outgoing President Donald Trump’s effort to overturn his 2020 election loss. “A flood of social media posts exhorted Trump supporters to flip over their flags or purchase new ones to display upside down,” the Times reported.

The justice later told Fox News that he had no role in the flag being flown in that manner. Rather, he said, his wife Martha-Ann Alito had raised the upside-down flag “for a short time” as a response to verbal attacks by her neighbors.

As the controversy developed, Alitos’s Democratic critics urged him to recuse himself from cases involving Trump and his actions during that period, saying the justice’s impartiality could not be assured. Supreme Court recusals are up to the justice, with no external mechanism to require them.

But the episode has spotlighted an even more basic question: Was flying the flag upside down against the law?

In a technical sense, perhaps. In a practical sense, no, legal experts say.

U.S. law lays out lengthy instructions for the proper display and treatment of the flag. 

For the Alitos, the most relevant portion of U.S. Code is: “No disrespect should be shown to the flag of the United States of America. … The flag should never be displayed with the union down, except as a signal of dire distress in instances of extreme danger to life or property.”

The notion of hanging a flag upside down to communicate distress has a long history in maritime culture, likely dating back to the British Isles in the 17th century, according to the North American Vexillological Association, an organization of flag scholars and enthusiasts. It was commonly used by ships through the 18th and 19th centuries until the development of more effective communication systems, notably radio. 

By now, “neither the International Code of Signals nor U.S. inland rules of the road recognize the inverted ensign as a distress signal,” and “signal books published by the U.S. maritime agencies specifically discourage its use.” (Today, ships in dire distress are supposed to signal with “N” and “C” international code flags — which stand for “November” and “Charlie” — or other specified flags.)

As a result, an inverted flag “has largely become a political signal,” the association has written.

For instance, prior to becoming an election-denial symbol in 2020, “many Cuban-Americans in Miami used it to protest the federal government taking Elian Gonzalez from his Miami relatives and sending him back to his father in the spring of 2000,” said Howard M. Wasserman, a Florida International University law professor.

But despite being part of U.S. law, it provides no enforcement mechanism for flying the flag right side up. In addition, the flag code’s text uses the softer term “should” when it discusses how flags should be treated, rather than “shall.” 

“The U.S. Flag Code can be understood as an etiquette manual,” Ted Kaye, the North American Vexillological Association’s secretary, told PolitiFact. 

And even if U.S. law did specify an enforcement mechanism, it would be impractical to charge all violators with criminality. 

For instance, another portion of the flag code forbids flags from being “used for advertising purposes in any manner whatsoever” and being printed “on paper napkins or boxes or anything that is designed for temporary use.” This is a common practice today and is never prosecuted. 

A big reason for the hands-off approach: Several rulings, most recently Texas v. Johnson in 1989, affirmed First Amendment protections for mistreating a flag. Since the 1989 decision, efforts to amend the Constitution to allow the prosecution of flag burning have come to naught.

“Punishing someone for flag misuse or desecration violates a bedrock free speech principle — that government has no power to punish a speaker based on the message they seek to convey, including through the potent symbol of the U.S. flag,” said Timothy Zick, a William & Mary law professor.

“Flying the flag upside down to send a political message is protected by the First Amendment,” said Gregory P. Magarian, a law professor at Washington University in St. Louis. 

With the Supreme Court having taken the flag’s mistreatment out of the legal realm more than three decades ago, questions of flag-display propriety shift instead to the world of norms, Magarian said.

“Alito couldn’t be prosecuted for altering the flag to send a political message,” he said. “However, the statute still makes a normative statement about behavior of which society should disapprove. I think that’s the likeliest sense in which the statute could be relevant for the present discussion.”

News of the helicopter crash that killed Iran’s president and foreign minister May 19 sparked a flurry of images on social media. But some of the photos gaining attention do not show the actual scene on the ground. 

One viral May 20 post on X claimed to show the wreckage of the plane that came down in northwest Iran near the border with Azerbaijan, framing it as “breaking news.” The post includes three photos of a crash and a video of rescuers holding a stretcher.

“Breaking news: Many bodies of those died in Iran President Raisi helicopter crash have been burnt and cannot be identified,” the X post claimed, using all capital letters.

The video in the post is real footage from the May 19 crash released by the Islamic Republic News Agency, Iran’s official news agency. But two of the three photos were taken from a separate Iranian crash that happened four years ago.

One image shows the tail of a crashed plane embossed with the Iranian flag and the number 1136. Another photo shows several rescue workers at the crash site; one rescuer wears a white mask and looks into the camera.

The photos are from an April 22, 2020, plane crash in Iran. That plane was traveling from Bisheh Kolah, Mazandaran province, to the capital Tehran, according to the Iranian Red Crescent, a humanitarian relief organization, in an X post.

Iranian news outlet Rokna reported on the crash April 22, 2020. (We converted the article’s Persian calendar date of 1399/02/3 to the Gregorian calendar used in many parts of the world.) The state-owned Mehr News Agency also reported about the crash on the same date and said the aircraft was a “training plane” owned by Iranian police.

Ghoncheh Habibiazad, a BBC journalist who monitors Iranian media, said the state-affiliated Fars News Agency published a third photo in the post that shows uniformed officers surrounding a blue aircraft’s tail. 

The photos from 2020 do not accurately show the crash that killed Iran President Ebrahim Raisi and Foreign Minister Hossein Amirabdollahian. We rate the out-of-context photos in the X post False.

Six months before the 2024 presidential election, Milwaukee Mayor Cavalier Johnson replaced the head of the city’s election commission. The change had social media users claiming the change was motivated by the discovery of fraudulent activity in the 2020 election.

Johnson on May 6 replaced Milwaukee Election Commission Executive Director Claire Woodall, nominating her deputy, Paulina Gutiérrez, to replace her. 

A May 6 X post alleged that Woodall had been fired after printing ballots and recruiting employees to fill them out.

“Recently FIRED Claire Woodall-Vogg printed 64,000 ballots in a back room at City Hall in Milwaukee and had random employees fill them out. Miraculously Biden took the lead in the middle of the night,” said the post, which had been viewed more than 410,000 times as of May 21. “64,000 ballots. The margin in the presidential election was 20,000!!!”

In a reply to her X post, the user shared a separate X post from a Wisconsin man who accused Woodall of “printing ballots in the back conference room. That man filed a 2021 lawsuit against Woodall, alleging she and others printed ballots in a back room at City Hall in fall 2020.

We found multiple social media posts and conservative media articles and videos making similar allegations about Woodall, some of them also citing the 64,000 ballot figure. 

There are some unknowns about why Woodall was replaced, according to reporting by PolitiFact’s partners at the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel.

But there’s no evidence that Woodall printed tens of thousands of ballots in a back room and had workers fill them out. A spokesperson for Milwaukee’s mayor told PolitiFact that Woodall was not replaced for any improper conduct related to the 2020 election.

Jeff Fleming, a Johnson spokesperson, told PolitiFact that Woodall did nothing improper in the 2020 election. The 2021 civil lawsuit that alleged she did is not connected to the mayor’s decision, he said.

Former President Donald Trump and his supporters have long baselessly claimed that Trump won the Wisconsin vote in 2020 and that there was election fraud found that tipped the state’s election to Biden. Neither claim is accurate, PolitiFact has reported. Biden won statewide by nearly 20,700 votes. Many conspiracy theories about Wisconsin’s election stem from absentee votes being added to the tally late at night. Wisconsin law does not allow clerks to process absentee ballots until polls open on Election Day, so many Milwaukee votes were reported late  on election night and early the next morning.

Why was Woodall replaced?

When news of Woodall’s replacement broke, Johnson didn’t give a reason for the change when he responded to news reporters’ questions, but he did say she wasn’t fired. He said she had been offered another position that she chose not to accept. 

“There was absolutely no evidence, indication, or credible information of any improper action related to the conduct of elections or the counting of votes,” Fleming said.

Fleming said Woodall remains on the city payroll in support of the election commission for at least the next two months. He said that Johnson also made leadership changes in two other cabinet positions, which state law allows a mayor to do upon inauguration for a new term, which happened April 16.

Woodall told PolitiFact the mayor “decided to go a different direction with his appointment.” She did not accept the other position, she said, because it did not yet exist and hadn’t been formally approved. There were many details to still be worked out, she said.

“I decided it was best for us to focus on a transition plan and to seek new opportunities outside of city employment after I assist with this transition,” Woodall said.

Election workers, right, verify ballots as recount observers, left, watch Nov. 20, 2020, during a Milwaukee hand recount of presidential votes at the Wisconsin Center. (AP)

The 64,000 question

The 64,000 figure appears to have originated with a Wisconsin man named Peter Bernegger, who has referred to it in other X posts.

Bernegger was convicted of bank and mail fraud in Mississippi in 2009, unrelated to any elections. In February, Wisconsin prosecutors accused Bernegger of falsifying a 2023 subpoena in an election-related case, and he was charged with “simulating legal process,” a felony. There’s a preliminary hearing for Bernegger scheduled for June 20.

The Wisconsin Elections Commission in 2022 fined Bernegger more than $2,400 for making frivolous election complaints. He has filed at least 18 lawsuits against Wisconsin election officials alleging fraud.

We reached out to Bernegger by email through his organization, Election Watch, but received no response.

Woodall said she doesn’t know how Bernegger arrived at “this magical 64,000 number.”

“I can assure you I did not print 64,000 ballots and that does not appear in the deposition,” Woodall said.

Bernegger filed a 2021 open records lawsuit against Woodall. Although the lawsuit didn’t refer to the 64,000 figure, he accused Woodall and others of printing ballots in a City Hall conference room.

That number did come up in Woodall’s April 13, 2022, deposition in that case, provided to PolitiFact by Milwaukee Assistant City Attorney Peter Block. But it wasn’tin the context Bernegger described in his X post. 

Bernegger asked about an absentee ballot application, which Woodall said are used for voters seeking in-person absentee ballots. Bernegger asked how many were accepted by Woodall’s office in the November 2020 election, and she said between 60,000 and 64,000. She did not, however, say anything about printing those ballots in a City Hall back room. 

Block said the Milwaukee County Circuit Court ruled against Bernegger and dismissed the case last year, but Bernegger has appealed to the Wisconsin Court of Appeals, which has not reached a decision.

Fleming said it’s not physically or logistically possible for the city to print 64,000 ballots in a back room at City Hall.

“The city does not maintain commercial printing capabilities, which would be needed to print tens-of-thousands of ballots,” he said.

All ballots are printed by city vendors, unless a ward exceeds anticipated turnout, Fleming said. In those cases, small batches of new ballots can be printed, he said.

“There would be dozens printed, not the thousands that are falsely claimed,” Fleming said.

Our ruling

An X post claimed the Milwaukee Election Commission’s executive director was fired after she “printed 64,000 ballots in a back room at City Hall in Milwaukee and had random employees fill them out,” giving Biden a lead in the 2020 election.

The 64,000 figure originated from an X post by a man who has been convicted of fraud and currently faces felony charges in Wisconsin of simulating a legal process. He has filed at least 18 lawsuits against Wisconsin election officials and has been fined by a state commission for making frivolous claims. None of them have produced evidence that Woodall printed 64,000 ballots.

A mayoral spokesperson said Woodall was not replaced as director because of any improper conduct during the election, and that the city lacks the capability to print that many ballots.

We rate this claim False.

PolitiFact Researcher Caryn Baird contributed to this fact-check.

With the 2024 Summer Olympics nearing, misinformation about transgender swimmer Lia Thomas has proliferated online. 

 “U.S. Olympic committee says Lia Thomas is welcome to try out for the men’s team,” reads text in an image labeled “news” that’s being shared on social media. 

“Thomas won’t be swimming for the US Women’s team anytime soon,” a May 12 Facebook post said. 

It was flagged as part of Meta’s efforts to combat false news and misinformation on its News Feed. (Read more about our partnership with Meta, which owns Facebook and Instagram.)

The post included a link in the comments that led to a website called “Freshstoryes.”  A May 11 post’s headline there said, “US Olympic committee says Lia Thomas is welcome to try out — for the men’s team.” 

That blog post included no indication that this is fake news — but it is. 

The story was lifted from SpaceXArena, which describes itself as a site that uses “parody and exaggeration to mock current events and trends and to provide entertainment and laughter to our readers.”

The site’s undated post about Thomas is labeled “satire.” We searched for but found no credible news stories reporting that any Olympic-affiliated group suggested Thomas try out for the men’s team.

Thomas is challenging transgender restrictions imposed by World Aquatics, swimming’s global governing body. She made history as a University of Pennsylvania swimmer in 2022 when she became the first transgender athlete to win a NCAA Division I title. Later that year, she was nominated for the NCAA Woman of the Year award.

But claims the “U.S. Olympic committee” encouraged her to try out for the men’s team are False. 

 

After Alfredo “Dr. Sebi” Bowman, a self-proclaimed herbalist healer, contracted pneumonia and died in 2016 while in a Honduran jail, rumors spread on social media that he had been killed for promoting alternative diets. 

His family debunked those claims. Now, Sebi’s family is the subject of misinformation. 

PolitiFact recently fact-checked and found false a claim that “Dr. Sebi’s cousin was sent to prison” for revealing “gatekept health secrets.” 

Other Facebook posts now claim that “Dr. Sebi’s daughter was SENTENCED to 155 years in prison for revealing TOP SECRET health hacks.” 

These posts were flagged as part of Meta’s efforts to combat false news and misinformation on its News Feed. (Read more about our partnership with Meta, which owns Facebook and Instagram.)

We found no evidence that this claim is authentic. We looked for credible news stories to corroborate the posts but found none, and discovered no public statements from Sebi’s daughter, Kellie Bowman, about the claim. We reached out to her for comment but didn’t immediately hear back.

But an image of the supposed incarcerated daughter in at least one of the posts making the claim is suspect. Doing a reverse image search, we found nothing connecting the picture to Sebi, and if you look closely at the woman’s bound wrists, they seem to converge into one sole hand. 

This post and the post about Sebi’s cousin supposedly being “life in prison” for revealing “gatekept health secrets” seem to follow a formula. Yet another post PolitiFact fact-checked claimed that the cousin of Barbara O’Neill, a former Australian naturopath, was “sentenced to life in prison for revealing … gatekept health secrets.”

That post was fake, and so is this one. 

We rate it False.

 

In a video going viral on X, a woman in a plane puts on a jacket. Seconds later, the plane jolts and sends a nearby flight attendant and her cart into the air. The cart spills its contents on the woman, who folds her hands together as shouts erupt around the cabin.

X accounts are sharing this video claiming it’s from a Singapore Airlines flight that experienced severe turbulence May 21. One person died during the incident and media reported at least 71 were injured, according to a Bangkok hospital that treated the passengers.

(Screenshot from X)

But a reverse-image search shows the video shared in these viral posts depicts a flight from nearly five years ago.

Mirjeta Basha uploaded the video June 17, 2019, on Storyful, a social media intelligence company. Basha was aboard an ALK Airlines flight from Pristina, Kosovo, to Basel, Switzerland. Ten people were injured on that flight because of severe turbulence. 

The Boeing 777-300ER operated by Singapore Airlines took off from London May 20 and was bound for Singapore. It was diverted to Bangkok.

Media published authentic images from the aftermath of the Singapore Airlines flight, showing damaged parts of the ceiling and trays and beverages scattered on the floor. 

But this video circulating on X shows a flight from 2019, not turbulence from the Singapore Airlines flight that caused one casualty. We rate that claim False. ​

Gray wolves bring mixed feelings in Wisconsin and other places where the animals have repopulated over the last several decades. 

While advocates support strong protections for the animals, many farmers see them as a nuisance. And for hunters, a wolf can be the ultimate prize. 

No matter where the debate falls, in Wisconsin gray wolves are under the federal protections of the endangered species list, meaning they can’t be hunted or killed for any reason. The animals were relisted in February 2022, according to a Milwaukee Journal Sentinel report from Feb. 10, 2022.

U.S. Rep. Tom Tiffany, a Republican from Minocqua, and others strongly disagree with the recent relisting of the wolves.

In an April 30, 2024 post on X, formerly known as Twitter, the representative pushed for delisting. 

“The science is clear – the gray wolf has met and exceeded recovery goals,” he said. 

What’s up with gray wolves?

In Wisconsin, wolves have become a bitter topic, resulting in hours of testimony over the Department of Natural Resources’ proposal to maintain a flexible number of animals in the state. Most recently, the Republican-controlled Legislature tried to overrule the agency, but failed, according to a Sept. 22, 2023 report from the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. 

As of late 2022, Wisconsin had 972 wolves in 288 packs.

Elsewhere, there has also been a struggle over what to do with wolves, and how large of a population needs to be maintained. 

In 2020, the federal government under former President Donald Trump removed wolves from the endangered species list, allowing for the animals to be hunted for the first time in decades, according to a Feb. 12, 2022 report from CNN. As a result, states like Wisconsin opened hunting for the first time in years. For the Badger state, the uncoordinated season resulted in hunters killing more than 215 gray wolves, nearly double the state’s quota for the hunt.

But in 2022, under President Joe Biden, gray wolves were once again listed as endangered, meaning they could no longer be hunted. While the number of wolves in Wisconsin and Michigan have rebounded in recent years under protections, other states are still working to reestablish a population. 

According to CNN, without the protections, wolf populations on the West Coast and in the Southern Rocky Mountains would be particularly vulnerable, and there would be a risk of losing wolves forever in those areas.

So have populations rebounded enough to delist gray wolves?

When we asked Tiffany’s office about the claim, Communications Director Caroline Briscoe responded with several documents based on information from the U.S. Department of the Interior. 

They all included a variation of the same message, that wolves had recovered in the two main regions of the country where repopulation efforts were focused, the Great Lakes and the Rocky Mountains.

One of the documents shared, a 2022 op-ed in USA TODAY by Secretary of the Interior Deb Haaland even uses similar language to Tiffany’s post: “gray wolves recovered from near extinction.”

And information from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service upheld that conclusion too. 

“In total, the gray wolf population in the lower 48 states is more than 6,000 wolves, greatly exceeding the combined recovery goals for the Northern Rocky Mountains and Western Great Lakes populations,” said an Oct. 29, 2020 release from the agency. 

The release notes that the wolf population in the Western Great Lakes is the largest outside of Alaska, a testament to the species’ recovery, and says it was up to individual states to now craft their own strong protections.

But not all researchers and experts agree that the population has recovered.

According to the Center for Biological Diversity, an activist organization that aims to protect endangered species, wolves have made a recovery, but not enough to no longer need some kind of protection and management.

“Despite these substantial gains amid extreme challenges, the job of wolf recovery is far from over,” the Center website said. 

“Wolves need connected populations for genetic sustainability, and natural ecosystems need wolves to maintain a healthy balance of species. Yet today wolves occupy less than 10% of their historic range and continue to face persecution.”

Other researchers have also pointed out that there are not wolves in many of the states they once roamed outside of the federally designated zones, meaning the population is not yet fully recovered.

Our ruling

Tiffany claimed science has shown that “the gray wolf has met and exceeded recovery goals.”

Gray wolves have seen significant population growth in two areas: the Great Lakes region and the Northern Rockies region, the two designated recovery regions for the animals.

But while wolves are thriving in those areas, environmental organizations argue that wolves are not seen across all of the lower 48 states they once roamed – meaning the population is not fully recovered. 

And removing protections from the animals could lead to overhunting, which could prevent populations from spreading, or limit the gene pool for the animals. 

We rate this claim Half True.

 

Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi was killed in a May 19 helicopter crash that spurred a wave of speculation and misinformation on social media.

One post showed a screenshot of an X post of a helicopter emoji from an Israel-aligned X account called Israel War Room:

“Israel War Room posted this ‘ambiguous’ emoji minutes before the news of the Iranian president’s helicopter crash landing broke across a majority of news networks around the globe,” the May 20 Instagram post said. “Coincidence?”

(Screenshot from Instagram)

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.)

Israel War Room, a pro-Israel account that tracks Israel-related news on Instagram and X, was not the first account to post about the helicopter crash that killed Raisi.

The Tehran Times, an Iranian newspaper in English, posted about the helicopter crash at 8:44 a.m. on May 19. The Associated Press posted about the helicopter crash at 8:53 am ET. The Tasnim News Agency, which is linked to the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, an influential paramilitary organization within Iran, also posted about the crash at 8:53 a.m. ET.

Israel War Room, which on its X profile and its domain registration lists its location as in the U.S., posted a helicopter emoji five minutes later — at 8:58 a.m. ET.

Israel War Room’s X post didn’t come before news outlets first reported news of the helicopter crash. We rate that claim False.