Category: Fact Check

When Beyoncé said that her new record, “Cowboy Carter,” was born from an experience she had where it was “very clear” she wasn’t welcome, many people concluded that she meant her 2016 performance with The Chicks at the Country Music Association Awards. 

Although their rendition of Beyoncé’s “Daddy Lessons” “got much of the live audience on their feet,” Vulture reported, Beyoncé’s appearance “upset traditionalists, sparking a heated is-she-country-or-not debate and leading to gross displays of racism.” 

Beyoncé has said “Cowboy Carter” isn’t a country album but a “‘Beyoncé’ album.” But its first two singles landed on Billboard’s Hot Country Songs chart. 

Some social media posts claimed that they didn’t get there on their own merit. 

“Woah,” a May 7 Facebook post said. “Jay-Z paid more than $20 million to country radio stations to play Beyoncé songs so she’d top the Billboard country charts.”

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.)

Jay-Z, Beyoncé’s husband, did not pay money for country stations to play her songs. 

This claim originated from America’s Last Line of Defense, an online publisher of self-described satire. From its Facebook account, which notes “nothing on this page is real,” America’s Last

Line of Defense said April 9 that “‘Operation Push Cowboy Carter’ has been going for months, with Jay-Z reaching out to stations across the country with offers of cash and glam gifts.”

We rate posts that say this fake claim is authentic Pants on Fire!

 

President Joe Biden and former President Donald Trump face off again in November, but a recent Facebook post said no one is campaigning for 2024 votes.

“Something seems off and different about this election cycle, have you noticed what it is???” the May 4 post said. “I’ve been following elections for years very closely, but I’ve noticed something extremely odd, the first thing I’ve noticed is we are well into the season, we are very close and there is no campaigning going on, none whatsoever. I’ve also noticed that the news cycle is not dominated by the story of this year’s election, which begs the question, do they anticipate that they need to campaign for it???”

The post went on to say there may be a reason for this: “It almost seems as if they already know the end before the beginning, it’s almost as if they’re not even concerned at all about the outcome because they already know what the outcome is going to be.”

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.)

As a quick online search shows, the notion that the two candidates are not campaigning is verifiably false.

The Federal Election Commission shows the amount of money Biden, Trump and other official presidential candidates have raised and spent in the 2024 race. There’s also broad news coverage reflecting that these candidates are campaigning. 

In 2023, Biden and his allies spent more than $45 million in advertisements, a record amount for an incumbent in the off-year before the general election, NBC News reported.

In March, Biden’s campaign launched a $30 million ad buy, Politico said, and announced the President, Vice President Kamala Harris, first lady Jill Biden and second gentleman Doug Emhoff would stump “in every battleground state” that month. C-SPAN has cataloged these televised rallies, most recently showing Harris campaigning in Pennsylvania while Biden was in Wisconsin. 

 In May, Biden debuted “a new-seven figure ad buy … centered around abortion, a centerpiece issue for his campaign,” according to CBS News.

The Trump campaign, meanwhile, announced with the Republican National Committee in March that the campaign had raised more than $65 million. Trump has likewise rallied in battleground states and coverage of these campaign events has been robust.”The former president’s campaign events are surreal to experience,” one NPR report said. “All-day affairs that are equal parts religious revival and massive pep rallies, powered by an infamous musical playlist that runs for hours before he speaks.”

Biden had “a big edge” in recent ad spending as “Trump has had to devote millions of campaign funds to legal expenses,” CNN said, but this does not corroborate the claim in the Facebook post. 

It’s False.

A frenetic pod of dolphins off South Africa’s coast were praised for heroic actions in an April 16 Facebook post. 

“A whale giving birth in False Bay attracted sharks,” read the post, which included a minute-and-a-half long video showing a large whale amid countless dolphins, all leaping out of the water at random intervals. “Hundreds of dolphins appeared out of nowhere and swam in circles around her keeping the sharks away. They stayed with her until she and her baby were safe and then they escorted them both to safety.” 

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 video isn’t fabricated. It was filmed in the Atlantic Ocean’s False Bay, between the Cape Peninsula and the Hottentots Holland Mountains. But the story of a gallant ocean rescue? That whale of a tale is inaccurate.

(Screenshot from Facebook.)

We searched Google for claims of dolphins defending a mother whale, because it seemed as if the video footage and story would garner news coverage. We found no reports from reputable news sources that corroborated the Facebook post’s claims. Searches for False Bay dolphins, however, showed that a pod of dolphins had been caught on video during a feeding frenzy. 

Kade Tame captured the video near the coastal town Fish Hoek, South Africa, on March 28, 2021, according to a report by Cape Town Etc. 

“We saw the super-pod of dolphins and decided to follow them,” Tame told the Cape Town-focused lifestyle publication. “As we were following them, the other half of the super-pod was spotted swimming in from Muizenberg beach. We then realised that it was the same pod and (they) were doing this for a reason (gathering fish). Before we knew it, there was white water everywhere and the most spectacular feeding began.”

Around the same time as Cape Town Etc, The Daily Mail reported on the feeding frenzy and attributed the video to Tame.

Tame told The Daily Mail that hundreds of dolphins had worked together to trap a shoal of fish in a circle.

“With the prey fish all trapped in the middle the dolphins then began leaping around in the water in a huge fast circle spinning all the prey fish into a tight ball of sushi waiting to be eaten,” Tame said, according to The Daily Mail. 

The dolphins created such a strong current around the fish, Tame told The Daily Mail, that Tame’s 18-foot fishing boat began spinning in circles as the dolphins began feasting. 

“Suddenly a humpback whale arrived followed by two others and decided they wanted in on the feast and without so much as a thank you to the dolphins got stuck into the fish ball,” Tame said. “It seemed like there was enough for everyone as the dolphins and whales were feasting for about half an hour until all the food ran out and then they slowly drifted away.” 

Tame mentioned neither a mother whale nor a newborn when he recounted the story. 

The video shared with those 2021 news stories matched the video from the Facebook post in several places. 

There are parts of the Facebook video that don’t perfectly match the YouTube video, but the footage shares common details, suggesting that perhaps someone captured more video from another angle that wasn’t shared with Cape Cod Etc. 

Scientists have documented dolphins using the cooperative hunting technique Tame described to encircle and trap fish, which helps maximize a dolphin pod’s chances to feed. 

We rate the claim that the Facebook video shows dolphins rescuing whales from sharks False.

A rare, powerful geomagnetic storm over the weekend resulted in the northern lights being visible more widely than normal.

But some social media users said the brilliant light show of green, blue, pink and purple that many people unexpectedly observed was anything but natural. It was the result, they said, of an experiment from the High-frequency Active Auroral Research Program, commonly known as HAARP. 

“Did y’all enjoy the fabricated light show? Stop giving them so much credit. This was NOT the Aurora Borealis,” a May 11 Facebook post’s caption said. 

The post, and multiple social media posts like it, said the light display resulted from a HAARP experiment that was scheduled from May 8 to May 10. But spokespeople for HAARP and for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Space Weather Prediction Center said those claims are baseless.

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What is HAARP and what were they researching?

HAARP is a research site in Gakona, Alaska, that the U.S. military created in the 1990s; the University of Alaska, Fairbanks has managed it since 2015. Researchers from around the U.S. use the site to study the ionosphere, an upper layer of Earth’s atmosphere, using a high-frequency radio transmitter. Perhaps because of its government origin, HAARP has been the subject of numerous baseless claims PolitiFact has debunked that say the weather is being manipulated.

HAARP’s scientific campaign earlier this month had nothing to do with the aurora borealis, spokesperson Becky Lindsey said in an email to PolitiFact.

“The experiment studied mechanisms for the detection of orbiting space debris,” Lindsey said. 

Orbiting space debris includes human-made objects, such as old spacecraft or satellite parts. There’s about 9,000 metric tons of debris orbiting Earth, NASA said.

“This experiment is in no way linked to the solar storm or high auroral activity seen around the globe.” Lindsey said.

The aurora activity seen around the globe was triggered by a strong geomagnetic storm produced by the sun, Lindsey said, and was predicted well in advance by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

HAARP can create an artificial aurora — one was visible up to 300 miles from its Alaska site after a November 2023 experiment. But the energy HAARP creates is not strong enough to produce the optical display seen during a natural aurora, its website says.

About the solar storm and the aurora borealis

The northern lights — also known as the aurora borealis — are caused when electrons and protons collide with gases in Earth’s atmosphere, yielding colorful flashes of light that appear to shimmer in the night sky.

There is a similar phenomenon, the aurora australis, in the Southern Hemisphere.

The northern lights are typically seen closer to the north pole, but were visible as far south as Mexico and Hawaii in recent days, said Bryan Brasher, a project manager at the NOAA’s Space Weather Prediction Center.

Brasher also said many people being able to see the lights in unexpected places resulted from a rare, but perfectly natural, event, a powerful geomagnetic storm.

The Prediction Center on May 9 issued a rare G4 geomagnetic storm watch and on May 10 said in an X post that extreme G5 conditions reached Earth, the first time that’s happened since 2003.

Geomagnetic storms are ranked on a scale of 1 to 5, with 5 being the most powerful.

Brasher described the extreme geomagnetic storm as a “series of coronal mass ejections — billions of tons of plasma — traveling at millions of miles an hour, colliding with Earth’s magnetosphere,” Brasher said.

Brasher said there are dozens of magnetometer stations that measure fluctuations in Earth’s magnetic field, and these fluctuations were measured worldwide because of the storm.

A “localized radio transmitter energizing a small part of the ionosphere over Alaska is not going to have a global effect,” Brasher said.

Brasher said scientists had the data and imagery to say what caused the solar storm and could determine it was going to hit us and when. They issued several warnings before the event, as severe solar storms can disrupt communications, navigation systems, power grids and radio and satellite operations.

Our ruling

A Facebook post claimed that May’s widely seen aurora borealis was caused by a HAARP experiment conducted May 8 to May 10. The HAARP experiment, however, was to find ways to detect orbital debris in space and was not related to the worldwide auroral display, which a powerful geomagnetic storm caused. HAARP can create an artificial aurora, but the energy it creates is not strong enough to produce the display seen during a natural aurora.

We rate the claim False.

A Threads post claimed more than a week ago that former President Donald Trump’s social media platform, Truth Social, had shut down. 

“Breaking news, truth social is shut down, no longer operatable. God i hope so!!,” the May 3 post said, misspelling “operable.”

But a recent trip there proved otherwise.

This Threads 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 no credible news reports or other evidence showing Truth Social was ever shut down. 

On May 13, for example, Trump criticized talk show host Whoopi Goldberg, promoted some sneakers, and acknowledged Mother’s Day. 

Some commenters on the Threads post speculated that this claim may have stemmed from the May 3 news that  the Securities and Exchange Commission, charged auditing firm, BF Borgers and its owner, Benjamin Borgers with “massive fraud.” Trump Media, which owns Truth Social, had previously hired the firm.. 

The commission wrote May 1 that Borgers directed his staff to copy work papers from previous jobs, change the dates and pass them off as work papers for new audits. BF Borgers will pay a $12 million civil penalty and Benjamin Borgers will pay a $2 million civil penalty to settle the charges. 

The commission’s charges were not for any work BF Borgers performed for Trump Media, The Associated Press reported.

The firm and Borgers “also agreed to permanent suspensions, effective immediately, that will prevent them from handling SEC-related matters as accountants,” the Associated Press said.

We rate claims that Truth Social was shut down False.

 

A recent Facebook post claims that two men were killed after raising concerns about conduct at Boeing, the beleaguered aerospace company.

“Second Boeing whistleblower killed in 2 months!” a May 4 Facebook post said.

“Another Boeing whistleblower has died — what a weird coincidence that is, right?” a man in the post’s video says as a headline from a People magazine story appears. “Two Boeing whistleblowers dying under mysterious circumstances back-to-back in a matter of only two months, man that’s peculiar, isn’t it?” 

The May 2 People headline said: “Boeing-linked whistleblower dead, the second in 2 months: ‘He possessed tremendous courage,’ lawyers say.”

This Facebook 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 People story doesn’t say that anyone was killed. Rather, it reported on the April 30 death of Joshua Dean. Dean was a former quality auditor at Boeing supplier Spirit AeroSystems and one of the first whistleblowers to allege Spirit had ignored manufacturing defects on the Boeing 737 Max, according to The Seattle Times. He died “after a struggle with a sudden, fast-spreading infection,” the newspaper said. Dean’s aunt Carol Parsons told the Times that Dean became ill and went to the hospital in mid-April because he was having trouble breathing. 

Dean’s family told NPR that he quickly fell into critical condition after being diagnosed with a MRSA bacterial infection. 

In March, John “Mitch” Barnett, a former Boeing quality inspector who filed a whistleblower complaint over alleged plane safety flaws, was found dead.

The Charleston County Coroner’s Office in South Carolina said in a statement that Barnett died March 11 “from what appears to be a self-inflicted gunshot wound.” 

His attorneys said in a statement that they didn’t “see any indication he would take his own life” and urged local police to keep investigating despite the coroner’s initial ruling, NBC News reported.

Almost two months later, the Times reported, the police investigation into his death continues. Dean died of an infection, according to family and news reports, and as of May 7, there was no sign that Barnett had been killed. If that changes, we’ll reconsider our ruling. 

For now, this claim is False.

 

A recent Facebook post casts doubt on the Apollo 11 moon landing with an edited video that makes it appear as if someone in a green screen suit is holding the edge of the American flag planted on the moon in 1969. 

But, as we’ve reported many times, the moon landing is not a hoax. 

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.)

Although there’s no wind on the moon, NASA engineers “designed a flagpole with a horizontal bar allowing the flag to ‘fly’ without the benefit of wind to overcome the effects of the moon’s lack of an atmosphere,” according to a 1993 NASA report on the “political and technical aspects of placing a flag on the moon.” 

The flag is not “flying” because someone in a studio maneuvered it in a green screen suit.

The report said the flag planted on the moon by astronauts Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin has a ripple because the horizontal bar got stuck, and they couldn’t pull it all the way out.

We rate claims that this video proves the moon landing was a hoax Pants on Fire!

Did Lady Gaga wow attendees of New York’s 2024 Met Gala in two different flamboyant costumes? Or are they just a perfect illusion, to borrow the singer’s lyrics?

One viral May 5 Facebook post appears to show Lady Gaga in a coiled cream dress resembling New York City’s Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum. “MOTHER GAGA HAS ARRIVED!!!,” the post’s caption said. Another May 7 Facebook post appears to show Lady Gaga posing for photos in a bejeweled green ball gown. The same images have been shared by several accounts, and also shared on Threads and Instagram. 

The 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, Threads, and Instagram.)

Although these costumes are stunning, there is one glaring problem: Lady Gaga did not attend the 2024 Met Gala. Several news outlets reported about the “Poker Face” singer’s absence on the cream-and-green carpet May 6.

There is also a timeline problem: the Met Gala was May 6, but the image of Lady Gaga in the cream dress was first shared on May 5.

The images are generated by artificial intelligence, and Lady Gaga was not the only one targeted. PolitiFact has debunked similar claims about AI-generated photos of Rihanna and Katy Perry, neither of whom attended this year’s charity benefit.

We rate the claim that these images show Lady Gaga at the 2024 Met Gala Pants on Fire!

RELATED: No, this image doesn’t show Rihanna at the 2024 Met Gala

RELATED: AI-generated images of Katy Perry at 2024 Met Gala fool social media users, Perry’s mother

A viral 2020 photo showing an orangutan reaching its hand toward a man in a pool of water has resurfaced on social media. 

“The image shows an orangutan, currently under threat of extinction, while stretching out his hand to help a geologist who fell into a mud pool during his search,” a caption accompanying a Facebook photo says. The post has been liked more than 45,000 times.

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.)

(Screenshot from Facebook)

The photo was taken in 2020 at the Samboja Lestari orangutan rehabilitation center in Samboja, Indonesia. There, orangutans are rehabilitated in captivity until they are ready to be released in the wild. 

But information from the Borneo Orangutan Survival Foundation, the nonprofit group overseeing the Samboja Lestari rehabilitation center, said the man pictured was neither a geologist, nor had fallen into the mud pool. 

Photographer Anil Prabhakar took the image and posted it to his Instagram account in 2020 with the caption, “Let me help you?: Once Humanity dying in Mankind, sometime animals are guiding us back to our basics.” 

An Instagram video posted in 2020 by the Borneo Orangutan Survival Foundation explains that the man in the viral video is a technician who was clearing sediments and grass, not a geologist. 

The orangutan “very easily could have been asking for food” from the technician since the animal is still dependent on humans, the video says. 

We rate the claim that an image shows an orangutan “stretching out his hand to help a geologist who fell into a mud pool” False.

Former President Donald Trump is charged with falsifying business records during his 2016 presidential campaign to cover up a $130,00 hush money payment to adult film actor Stormy Daniels. The payment allegedly was made to keep her from talking about a previous sexual encounter with Trump. 

When Daniels testified in the ensuing criminal trial May 7, she “spoke quickly, unspooling so many salacious details that the judge overseeing the case balked at some of the testimony, implying that it was gratuitously vulgar,” The New York Times reported. 

That same day, a statement attributed to Daniels appeared on Threads: “I had no idea if he penetrated me — and I am a professional, he just kept yelling, I’m yuge! I’m the greatest, and then he made gurgling sounds and fell asleep. Hey, it was a job and the check cleared.” 

But this isn’t a real quote from Daniels.

This Threads 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.)

In March, Daniels said in an X post that the statement was fake. 

“Is this for real?” someone said on X, sharing an image of Daniels from a 2018 “60 Minutes” interview in which she described her alleged affair with Trump. The text over the image is the same that appears in the May 7 Threads post.

“No,” Daniels replied. 

We rate claims that Daniels said this — much less that she just said it on the stand during Trump’s New York criminal trial — False.