Category: Fact Check

The five exclamation points utilized in a recent Facebook post signal big news, but there’s nothing to see here. 

“Shocked!” the May 6 post said. “No one wanted to see what happened to Elon Musk this morning!!”

A link in the post announced, “The tragic end of Elon Musk! The news this morning shocked the UK!”

And a video in the post appeared to show a BBC News report promising that “British residents no longer need to work” thanks to X owner Elon Musk.   

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.)

First, there’s no mention of Musk’s alleged “tragic end.” He is alive (and active on X). And his companies haven’t shuttered.

In the video, the BBC News host appears to explain that Musk’s purported new project will allow residents to earn passive income every day. It then cuts to a video of Musk who appears to expand on this supposed opportunity. 

But the video of Musk comes from a March 2023 appearance he made at the World Governments Summit — not a BBC News interview about a get-rich-quick scheme.

PolitiFact has fact-checked a similar claim before. In 2023, another altered BBC News report made it appear as though the host said British residents no longer needed to work thanks to Musk. 

That was false and so is this. We rate this claim Pants on Fire!

 

Twice in recent interviews, President Joe Biden has made an inaccurate statement about one of the top issues motivating voters this election year: inflation.

First, during a May 8 interview with CNN’s Erin Burnett, Biden said that inflation “was 9% when I came to office.” 

Then, during a May 14 interview with Yahoo Finance, Biden said the same thing, that inflation “was 9% when I came to office. Nine percent.”

As we reported when Biden made the remark to CNN, inflation was much lower when Biden took office.

Inflation hit 9% — the highest in about four decades — about a year and a half into Biden’s presidency. 

When Biden was inaugurated, year-over-year inflation was about 1.4%. That was during a period when the coronavirus pandemic diminished many types of economic activity, notably travel and hospitality. When economic demand sinks, inflation tends to be low.

From January 2021 to June 2022, inflation rose precipitously, primarily because of supply shortages as the pandemic receded and demand rose. Biden’s American Rescue Plan, which put more money into Americans’ pockets when supply was spotty, intensified the increase in prices, as did Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine. The war sent U.S. gasoline prices to near-record highs.

So, inflation rose under Biden. It also rose for many of the world’s advanced economies. 

Still, 9% was not something Biden inherited, as he phrased it in both interviews.

The White House told PolitiFact that Biden’s point was that the factors that caused inflation were in place when he took office. The White House pointed to the pandemic Biden inherited and the supply chain shortages it caused, including for semiconductors. The White House added that annualized core inflation (a measure that excludes volatile items such as energy and food) had already spiked by the second quarter of 2021, within a few months of Biden’s inauguration.

Economists told PolitiFact that there is no surefire way to determine what portion of inflation stemmed from supply chains, Biden’s American Rescue Plan and Russia’s invasion that occurred early in his second year.

“I have seen various breakdowns but can’t say I have too much faith in any exact numbers,” said Dean Baker, co-founder of the liberal Center for Economic and Policy Research.

Biden “was in error” to say inflation was 9% when he took office, said Gary Burtless, an economist with the Brookings Institution. But he added that “it’s also correct to say some spike in inflation in his first couple of years in office was inevitable if the administration, Congress, and the Federal Reserve wanted to speed the recovery using the tools of fiscal and monetary policy available to them.”

Douglas Holtz-Eakin, president of the center-right American Action Forum, agreed that it’s hard to say how much each factor spurred inflation’s rise. But he said that in 2021, U.S. inflation accelerated more quickly than European inflation did, when the U.S. was offering greater fiscal stimulus than European nations.

“The bottom line is that the president cannot avoid some responsibility for inflation,” Holtz-Eakiin said. “At the same time, he is not solely responsible for inflation, either.”

Our ruling

Biden said inflation “was 9% when I came to office. 9%.”

Inflation did hit 9% during Biden’s tenure, but about a year and a half into his presidency. When Biden was inaugurated, year-over-year inflation was about 1.4%.

Some factors that pushed inflation to 9% were in place by the time his presidency started, such as supply chain problems. But others, including the American Rescue Plan and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, were not.

We rate his statement False.

As many high school seniors prep for their first year of college, a new Wisconsin law will give the state’s highest-performing high schoolers a guaranteed spot at any of the Universities of Wisconsin campuses.

Signed into law in February, it requires the UW system and local technical college boards to create a guaranteed admission program for Wisconsin applicants ranked in the top 5% of their class.

In his latest newsletter, Assembly Majority Leader Tyler August, R-Walworth, described the legislation as a way to keep Wisconsin students in the state for college and beyond.

“Admission should be based on merit and achievement, not race and identity. With nearly 90% of all UW graduates staying in Wisconsin five years after they graduate, we need to do a better job of reducing ‘brain drain’ and keep our best and brightest here in our state,” August said in his May 3 newsletter.

The claim that nearly 90% of alumni across the UW campuses stay in the state postgraduation stood out to us. 

We decided to track down that data.

The majority of Wisconsin resident alumni will remain in the state after graduation

Before we get into where alumni live, it’s important to note that August is talking about keeping in-state students in Wisconsin postgraduation — not all UW alumni.

Although the direct statement is broader, referring to all UW alumni, the context of the claim came from August’s newsletter which talked about wanting to keep in-state high school students in Wisconsin after college.

UW keeps track of where bachelor’s degree recipients across the 13 campuses live based on information they provide to their alumni associations.

UW’s latest 2021 data on alumni residency shows the majority of in-state students will live in Wisconsin after earning their degree.

Based on 2015-2016 in-state UW graduates, 87% of them still lived in Wisconsin by 2021.

One year postgraduation, 90% of in-state students will still live in Wisconsin, while 10 years after graduation 80% will.

When you look at out-of-state alumni living in Wisconsin, that percentage drops significantly. Sixteen percent of out-of-state students, excluding Minnesota students, lived in Wisconsin five years after graduation.

Minnesota students are specifically separated from the UW’s out-of-state alumni data because of a reciprocity agreement that allows Minnesota students to attend UW schools without paying nonresident tuition.

Minnesota students are even less likely to live in Wisconsin after graduation, though, with 10% staying in the state five years later. 

Our ruling

In his legislative newsletter, August said “Nearly 90% of all UW graduates stay in Wisconsin 5 years after they graduate.”

Based on UW’s data on where bachelor’s degree recipients across the 13 campuses live, 87% of in-state students lived in Wisconsin five years after graduation. 

We rate this claim True.

 

Philanthropist George Soros has long been maligned by false claims that he’s affiliated with the Nazi Party, and some have emerged anew as his name is misleadingly connected to pro-Palestinian protests on American college campuses. 

A May 9 Instagram post’s caption, for example, says, “George Soros is a roaring, cold-blooded Nazi sociopath and one of the largest donors is funding the radical anti Israel college protests around the country.”

The post attributed this quote to Soros about Nazi-occupied Europe: “It was actually probably the greatest year of my life, the year of German occupation, because you see incredible suffering around you.” It also includes a video bearing the logo of Infowars, a website trafficking in conspiracy theories. 

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.)

First, Soros is not a Nazi. He is a Hungarian Jew who fled fascism. When the Nazis invaded Hungary, his father obtained false identities for Soros and his brother, and Soros was sent to live with an agricultural official who passed him off as his Christian godson. 

“This is how Mr. Soros was able to survive the Nazi occupation,” Open Society Foundations, the philanthropic organization Soros founded, previously told PolitiFact. “Mr. Soros was hiding from the Nazis in order to survive.” 

We searched for the quote attributed to Soros in the post and found only other social media posts — no credible sources. But it appears to be a paraphrase of something Soros can be heard saying in the first of two clips in the Instagram post’s video.  

In the first clip, an audio recording, Soros says: “It was actually probably the happiest year of my life, that year of German occupation. For me, it was a very positive experience. It’s a strange thing because you see incredible suffering around you and the fact you are in considerable danger yourself. But you’re 14 years old and you don’t believe that it can actually touch you. You have a belief in yourself. You have a belief in your father. It’s a very happy-making exhilarating experience.”

This comes from a 2001 interview Soros did with journalist Charlie Rose, but it’s been edited to leave out some context. 

“It was also a very strange experience for me because it was actually probably the happiest year of my life — that year of German occupation — because for a 14-year-old kid to have an adventure — first of all, I had a father who understood what’s going on,” Soros said in the interview. “We were confronted by unspeakable evil. It’s like a David-and-Goliath fight, and you are on the side of the angels. And you actually prevail by surviving. So, for me, it was a very positive experience. It’s a strange thing, you know, because you see incredible suffering around you. And, in fact, you are in considerable danger yourself. But you’re 14 years old, and you don’t believe it, that it can actually touch you. You have a belief in yourself. You have belief in your father. It’s a very happy-making, exhilarating experience.”

The post’s second clip is from a 1998 Soros interview with CBS’  “60 Minutes.” In the clip, then- “60 Minutes” Correspondent Steve Kroft says, “While hundreds of thousands of Hungarian Jews were being shipped off to the death camps, George Soros accompanied his phony godfather on his appointed rounds, confiscating property from the Jews.”

Kroft added, “You watched lots of people get shipped off to the death camps.” 

“Right,” Soros said. “I was 14 years old. And I would say that that’s when my character was made.”

Kroft goes on to say that Soros’ fake godfather “helped in the confiscation of property from Jews.” Soros confirms this is true, but said it wasn’t a difficult experience for him. 

“Maybe as a child you don’t — you don’t see the connection,” Soros said. 

He later clarified: “I could be on the other side or I could be the one from whom the thing is being taken away. But there was no sense that I shouldn’t be there because that was — well, actually, in a funny way, it’s just like in markets — that if I weren’t there — of course, I wasn’t doing it, but somebody else would be taking it away anyhow. And it was the — whether I was there or not, I was only a spectator, the property was being taken away. So, I had no role in taking away that property. So, I had no sense of guilt.”

As a 2018 New York Times profile of Soros notes, the job of the agricultural official who cared for Soros included “taking inventory of a confiscated Jewish-owned property.”

“He took George with him,” the story said. “These episodes have become the basis for the claim that George was a Nazi collaborator. In fact, though, there is no credible evidence that he collaborated with or was sympathetic to Nazis.”

In a 2011 essay in The New York Review of Books, Soros describes 1944 as a year in which his family “resisted an evil force that was much stronger than we were — yet we prevailed. 

“Not only did we survive, but we managed to help others,” Soros said. “This left a lasting mark on me, turning a disaster of unthinkable proportions into an exhilarating adventure. That gave me an appetite for taking risk, and under my father’s wise guidance I learned how to cope with it — exploring the limits of the possible but not going beyond them. I relish confronting harsh reality, and I am drawn to tackling seemingly insoluble problems.”

We rate claims that Soros is a Nazi Pants on Fire!

PolitiFact Researcher Caryn Baird contributed to this report.

 

Amid independent presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s frequent appearances on conservative news, former President Donald Trump has taken notice. Trump, a Republican, said that a vote for Kennedy is a “wasted protest vote” and that the third-party candidate is “far more LIBERAL than anyone running as a Democrat.”

Trump was echoing the sentiment of radicalf-ingkennedy.com, a website of the MAGA Inc. political action committee. The Trump campaign made similar statements about Kennedy’s past positions in a May 2 post on X. 

“RFK Jr. is a Radical Left Democrat,” the Trump campaign account said.

The campaign then said that Kennedy:

The Trump campaign also pointed out Kennedy’s past support of Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama and “praised” Sen. Bernie Sanders, the independent Vermont senator who ran for president as a Democrat. In July 2016, Kennedy endorsed Clinton’s presidential candidacy and called himself a “huge admirer” of Sanders, Clinton’s primary rival. Kennedy said in 2023 that he had no regrets about voting for former President Obama. 

Kennedy launched his presidential campaign in 2023 as a Democrat, but months later said he would run as an independent. He has taken some policy positions on the right and frequently gives interviews to conservative media.

With Kennedy’s past embrace of Democratic leaders well documented. we wanted to explore the Trump campaign’s claims about his past positions. The statements about Kennedy’s positions on voter ID, the National Rifle Association and affirmative action missed some context.

In 2008, Kennedy called voter ID racist

Nearly two decades ago, Kennedy was critical of  laws requiring voters to present ID.

In an October 2008 interview with NBC host Rachel Maddow, Kennedy said voter ID was discriminatory.

Kennedy said many Americans lack driver’s licenses, including older people, young people and Black people.

“In other words, Democratic voters,” Kennedy said. “One in 5 Democratic — 1 in 5 Black voters does not have a driver‘s license. That means if you require a driver‘s license, you‘re getting rid of 20% of the Black voters in this country.”

Kennedy also joined journalist Greg Palast to co-author “Steal Back Your Vote,” a 2008 comic book that said nuns in Indiana were turned away from voting because their driver’s licenses were expired. The comic book referred to voter ID as a “racially rancid rule.”

The book mentioned research about the disproportionate impact on Black voters who were less likely to have a driver’s license than white people. In a 2021 article, PolitiFact highlighted similar research conclusions, including by academics and the Atlanta Journal-Constitution.

States set their own laws for voter ID, including how strictly they are applied and what forms of ID, photo or others, are accepted. Today, the majority of states require some type of voter ID.  The trend over the past two decades has been toward tighter voter ID requirements. 

But in his current presidential campaign, Kennedy has not called voter ID laws racist.

Fox News’ Jesse Watters asked Kennedy on Aug. 29, 2023, about voter ID and how his plan would address concerns about fraud and “illegal voting.” 

Kennedy replied that “a lot of poor people, particularly people in cities who don’t drive, don’t have access to identification, and if we had voter ID laws, it would keep them from voting. So, it would keep a huge demographic of people from voting.” Kennedy said providing a free ID could solve this problem and did not describe voter ID laws as racist.

In a May 1 interview with Watters, Kennedy walked back his earlier comments more completely.

Watters: “You said voter ID was racist. Is that true?”

Kennedy: “Maybe. You know, look, I had a lot of positions. I went through an evolution like many people in this country. And you know, I said things years ago, I had positions years ago that I look back on and say that was not -— there was nothing good about that. I think we — you know, listen, what I’ve said on the voter ID issue is that I’m going to issue voter passports — passport IDs to every American who can’t afford them, that will end that issue.”

“If free ID is made available, Mr. Kennedy is in favor of voter ID requirements to assure the public of election integrity,” Stefanie Spear, a Robert F. Kennedy Jr. spokesperson, told PolitiFact.

Kennedy called the NRA a “terror group” in 2018

In the aftermath of the Feb. 14, 2018, mass shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, Kennedy described the NRA as terrorists.

Kennedy tweeted Feb. 17, 2018: “Parkland students are right; the NRA is a terror group.”

Two days earlier, Kennedy tweeted about Marjory Stoneman Douglas, using the abbreviation MSD: “Let’s be honest. The NRA is as responsible for the MSD child murders as if they pulled the trigger. NRA has turned 2d Amendment into a suicide pact for our children. When do we deal with NRA?”

Kennedy deleted the post around May 2023, according to the Decensored News account. The Kennedy campaign did not answer our question about why.

Kennedy walked back calling the NRA a “terror group” in an October 2023 interview with Fox News’ Sean Hannity.

Hannity: “Do you still believe the NRA is a terror group?”

Kennedy Jr.: “I support the Second Amendment, like I do all the amendments of the Constitution, and I’m not going to take people’s — “

Hannity: “I didn’t ask you if you support the Second Amendment. You called in 2018, you said, ‘Parkland students are right, the NRA is a terror group.’ Do you believe that?”

Kennedy Jr. “I don’t consider the NRA a terror group.”

Hannity: “Do you regret tweeting that in 2018?”

Kennedy Jr.: “Well, I don’t recall tweeting it in 2018. But if I did, as I said, Sean, I don’t consider them a terror group and I support the Second Amendment.”

Spear, Kennedy’s campaign spokesperson, said Kennedy “has come to understand that the gun owners represented by the NRA have a legitimate viewpoint.”

Kennedy spoke positively of affirmative action in 2023

In June 2023, the U.S. Supreme Court ended affirmative action for colleges.

Kennedy tweeted on the day of the ruling: “Regarding the Supreme Court banning affirmative action in higher ed(ucation) — I know many Americans feel that purely race-based decisions are unfair. However, this feeling misses important context. The effects of racist policies going back centuries are now self-perpetuating. Affirmative action understands this and uses race-based policies to undo the effects of racist policies. ‘Color-blind’ admissions tend to favor those who are already in the circle of privilege. It favors those who grew up in affluent, educated households. Wouldn’t you like to invite in those who have been left out in the cold?”

Asked about Kennedy’s position about affirmative action, Spear said, “That tweet does not advocate affirmative action per se. It was intended to highlight the need to recognize the situation that affirmative action seeks to address. He believes we must find constitutionally sound and fair ways to address the legacy of centuries of racist practices that still affect the Black community.”

When we asked Kennedy’s campaign for his current position on issues including affirmative action, Kennedy’s campaign sent us to the candidate’s policy portion of his website. The page about the Black community does not address affirmative action.

That page of Kennedy’s website calls for “increased trade school and college prep opportunities for our youth” and said “working on organic, healing farms will unlock significant assets to pay your way through college or learn a trade, start a small business or put a down payment on a home.”

Our ruling

A Trump campaign X post said Kennedy Jr. called voter ID “racist,” calls NRA a “terrorist organization” and supports affirmative action. 

The Trump campaign was careful and used the past tense “called” — a reference to Kennedy’s statements in 2008 in which he spoke about voter ID as racially discriminatory. But during his presidential campaign, Kennedy has talked about voter ID differently by stating that wants the government to provide free ID.

In 2018, Kennedy called the NRA a “terror group” but in 2023 he said “I don’t consider the NRA a terror group.”

In 2023, he made statements in support of affirmative action.

Overall, the Trump statement is partially accurate but is missing context, including about more recent statements that he made about voter ID and the NRA.

We rate this statement Half True.

RELATED: All of our fact-checks about Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

Denmark’s king, Frederik X, traveled to Stolkholm on May 6 for his first official trip abroad, but he wasn’t filmed waving a Palestinian flag from a balcony in a city about 600 kilometers southeast several days later. 

A video posted May 12 on Instagram identifies the flagbearer as the Danish monarch, however. 

“The king of Denmark waved the Palestinian flag from the balcony in support of Palestine,” reads text over a video of a man waving a Palestinian flag from a balcony. 

An Instagram 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.)

The man on the balcony is not and does not resemble King Frederik, Denmark’s king.

A reverse-image search of a screenshot from the video led us to a May 12 X post that falsely described the video as showing King Frederik waving the flag “from a balcony as he greets hundreds of protesters demonstrating in Copenhagen in solidarity with the people of Palestine.” 

Links attached to the X post flagging it as misinformation include a Wikipedia page for a former girls school in Malmo. We found the address for the building and looked at it on Google Street View. Rounding the corner, we discovered the building in the video. 

Another X user said in a May 12 post that the man on the balcony was “with his kid when our demonstration in Malmo passed his flat this week. Disinformation is not helpful for the cause. It was super cute though, the kid blew bubbles!”

On May 9, pro-Palestinian protesters gathered in Malmo to decry Israel’s inclusion in the Eurovision Song Contest. 

We rate claims this video shows the king of Denmark waving a Palestinian flag Pants on Fire!

 

China’s population is poised to age dramatically in the coming years, posing financial strains to retirement pensions. But in recent remarks, President Joe Biden said this pain had already occurred.

Biden, speaking to supporters in Seattle on May 12, said the U.S. maintains its strong economic position in part because of its openness to outsiders. “We’re not xenophobic,” he said. “We allow people to come in and work. We grow our economy.”

He contrasted the United States’ demographics to China, the world’s second-biggest economy and arguably the U.S. biggest economic rival. 

“Look at China,” Biden said. “China’s in a situation where they have more retired than working. They don’t know what to do about it.”

This reversal is poised to happen — but in the early 2050s, about a quarter century from now.

For now, “China’s aging crisis is still less severe than that of the United States, so unsurprisingly, its economic growth rate is still higher,” Fuxian Yi, a senior scientist in obstetrics and gynecology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and a specialist on Chinese demographics, told PolitiFact. 

But within a decade or so, “all of China’s demographic parameters will be worse than those of the United States, and its economic growth rate will begin to be lower than that of the United States,” Yi said.

The White House did not provide additional information when we inquired. Biden said something similar at least once before, during a February 2021 town hall in Milwaukee with CNN’s Anderson Cooper. 

Yi’s data show that today, China is home to 816 million people ages 16 to 59, and almost 283 million who are age 60 and older. That’s about 2.9 working-age people for every 60-or-older person. 

China has different retirement ages — 60 for men, 55 for white-collar women and 50 for working-class women. So, changing the age groups used in this calculation can modestly shift the year these numbers reach parity.For these age brackets, the numbers equalize in 2052. 

But whatever the age groups used, “President Biden’s remarks are indeed overstated and premature,” Yi told PolitiFact.

By contrast, the United States has about 193 million people ages 19 to 64, compared with more than 56 million people age 65 and older. In the U.S., the full retirement age is 66 or 67 years old, depending on the person’s birth year.

Other ways of slicing the data also foretell the coming fiscal squeeze on pensions in China, which has been exacerbated by the country’s one-child policy that was enforced from about 1980 to 2015.

China’s median age — which had been under 20 in 1971 — is currently about 43. But it’s set to reach 60 in 2060, and 64 by century’s end.

And the ratio of Chinese workers supporting each retiree is set to plunge.

Today, China has about 4.4 working-age people (that is, aged 18 to 64) for every person who is 65 or older. That ratio is set to fall below 2-to-1 by 2040 and below 1-to-1 by 2081. 

By comparison, the United States is in worse shape than China on this metric today; the current U.S. ratio of workers to retirees is about 2.6-to-1. But the U.S. curve is projected to level out rather than fall like China’s. China’s worker-to-retiree ratio is poised to sink below 2-to-1 in 2041 — a level that the U.S. is not forecast to fall below through the end of this century.

China’s demographic quandary will have economic consequences, Yi said.

“In the future, the economic gap between elderly China and middle-aged United States will again widen,” he said. “If the United States is overtaken as the world’s largest economy, it will be by India, not China.”

Our ruling

Biden said, “China’s in a situation where they have more retired than working.”

That’s not the case today; it’s projected to happen about a quarter century from now, depending on which age brackets are used for the calculation.

We rate the statement False.

A recent Instagram post warns of the fall of “Judeo Christian America,” sharing a video of a Palestinian flag being raised and then flying next to an American flag. 

“Chicago ceremonially raises the Palestinian flag to the same height as the American flag,” the May 13 post says. 

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 city of Chicago didn’t immediately respond to PolitiFact’s questions about the video. 

But we found the video in a May 13 YouTube post from Storyful, a company that “discovers, verifies and acquires” user-generated content. The video description says: “The Palestinian flag was raised at the Richard J. Daley Center in Chicago, Illinois, on Saturday, May 11, to commemorate the 76th anniversary of the Nakba.”

The Nakba, the Chicago Tribune explained in a May 11 story about the flag raising, is how Palestinians refer to their mass displacement in 1948 from what is now Israel. This was the third annual flag-raising ceremony to call attention to the humanitarian crisis in Gaza and to mark the 76th anniversary of the Nakba. 

But the city of Chicago didn’t raise the flag. The event was organized by the Chicago chapter of American Muslims for Palestine, which advocates for Palestinian rights. (The chapter also didn’t immediately respond to PolitiFact’s questions about the post.) 

The chapter advertised the event May 10 on Facebook, inviting people to “join us tomorrow for our flag raising” to “commemorate the anniversary of the 76th Nakba followed by a march to protest the ongoing genocide in Gaza.” 

“American Muslims for Palestine raised the Palestinian flag Saturday afternoon at Daley Plaza,” Chicago’s ABC News affiliate reported May 11. 

We rate claims that the city of Chicago raised the flag False.

 

ST. PETERSBURG, Florida — Poynter’s PolitiFact, the Pulitzer-Prize winning fact-checking newsroom, is pleased to announce the launch of a new Spanish-language experience, PolitiFact en Español, to help more than 40 million Spanish-speakers in the U.S. sort out the truth in politics.

A new Spanish-language website and a related social media presence are the culmination of an effort that began in 2023 when PolitiFact launched a Spanish-language team. The team’s fact-checks have appeared on pages of PolitiFact’s existing website and via Telemundo stations in Florida through a partnership that brings fact checks to the stations’ newscasts, digital and streaming platforms. But starting this month, a newly launched website www.politifact.com/espanol/ provides an excellent user experience in Spanish.

“We are excited about taking this next step to better serve the millions of people in the United States who consume news primarily in Spanish,” said Katie Sanders, PolitiFact editor-in-chief.

Deputy Editor Miriam Valverde, who started fact-checking immigration claims for PolitiFact in 2016, leads PolitiFact en Español and its team of Spanish-speaking reporters.

“Our new website and social media presence will provide Spanish speakers with fact-based information and help them guard against dangerous misinformation that is increasingly pervasive across platforms,” Valverde said.

The free website features fact checks from the PolitiFact en Español team, who root out Spanish-language misinformation in its many forms, and write in-depth stories and fact checks. Much of the fact-checking falls under Meta’s third-party fact-checking program, debunking misinformation on Instagram and Facebook. The team also translates trending fact checks and stories, both from English to Spanish and vice versa. 

Valverde said the premise was not to simply copy PolitlFact.com into Spanish, but to find ways to best serve the target audience. To that end, the effort has included launching a WhatsApp tipline to solicit reader ideas, as well as a WhatsApp channel. PolitiFact en Español also is active on TikTok and Instagram.

With the 2024 U.S. presidential election later this year, and Hispanic voters a coveted demographic from both parties, there will be no shortage of political claims to check, Sanders said.

“It’s especially important that PolitiFact en Español is a resource for Spanish-speaking voters, who will be bombarded with political messages, many of them false, during the campaign season,” she said.

Other partnerships include FactChequeado, a fact-checking organization that shares PolitiFact’s work with its network that includes Hispanic media outlets. PolitiFact also has a partnership with Telemundo and NBCUniversal’s TV stations in Florida to bring its fact-checks to the stations’ newscasts, digital, mobile and streaming platforms.

To inquire about partnering with PolitiFact en Español, contact PolitiFact Executive Director Aaron Sharockman or PolitiFact Editor-in-Chief Katie Sanders. 

Lea este artículo en español.