Category: Fact Check

After Iran launched a barrage of missiles at Israel on April 13 in its first direct military assault on the country, Sen. Rick Scott, R-Fla., told his X followers why he thought former President Donald Trump should be reelected.

“This is the strength we need back in the White House!” Scott wrote April 13, sharing a July 22, 2018, tweet in which Trump threatened Iran’s president. Trump later that day shared a screenshot of Scott’s post on Truth Social , without further comment.

Trump’s sharing of Scott’s post led several X users to accuse the former president of violating the Logan Act, a 1799 law that bars private citizens from communicating with foreign governments to influence them about disputes with the U.S.

“While Biden is busy asserting our influence on Israel to prevent escalation, Trump, the orange buffoon who didn’t know Putin invaded Ukraine, was busy violating the Logan Act to threaten Iran and cheered on by @GOP,” wrote one X user with 98,000 followers.

We found other X posts making similar accusations about Trump and the Logan Act.

Experts told Politifact that Trump’s resharing of an old social media post from when he was president doesn’t rise to a violation of the Logan Act.

In the 2018 tweet that Scott reshared, Trump wrote in all-caps to then-Iranian President Hassan Rouhani: “NEVER, EVER THREATEN THE UNITED STATES AGAIN OR YOU WILL SUFFER CONSEQUENCES THE LIKES OF WHICH FEW THROUGHOUT HISTORY HAVE EVER SUFFERED BEFORE. WE ARE NO LONGER A COUNTRY THAT WILL STAND FOR YOUR DEMENTED WORDS OF VIOLENCE & DEATH. BE CAUTIOUS!” Rouhani is no longer Iran’s president; he left office in 2021.

Trump’s post was in response to Rouhani’s July 2018 remarks warning the U.S. that war with Iran would be the “mother of all wars.”

The Logan Act says that a U.S. citizen “without authority of the United States” can be fined or imprisoned for up to three years for “directly or indirectly” corresponding with a foreign government to influence “any disputes or controversies with the United States.”

The Congressional Research Service said in a 2015 report that no one ever has been prosecuted under the Logan Act, although two people have been indicted, the last in 1853. The law has bubbled up in political chatter in recent years.

Trump has accused others of violating the act. In 2019, he twice accused John Kerry, a former secretary of state but then a private citizen, of violating the Logan Act by meeting with Iranian officials. He made a similar allegation against Sen. Chris Murphy, D-Conn., in 2020.

In 2017, bloggers accused Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., who is now deceased, of violating the act when he called an Australian ambassador to smooth over a contentious phone call between Trump and Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull. We rated that claim False. 

Similar accusations were made against Rep. Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., when she visited Syria in 2007 during President George W. Bush’s administration, and when 47 senators wrote a letter to Iran’s leaders in 2015 during President Barack Obama’s administration.

Frank Bowman, a former federal prosecutor and a University of Missouri emeritus law professor, argued in a 2017 Slate essay that retired U.S. Army Gen. Michael Flynn should not be charged for violating the Logan Act, as other legal scholars had proposed, for meeting with Russian officials while serving on Trump’s transition team. 

Regarding Trump’s recent action, “Tweeting doesn’t seem to me to constitute ‘correspondence or intercourse with any foreign government,’” as the Logan Act specifies, Bowman said. “Regardless of the technicalities, no competent prosecutor would touch this with a barge pole.”

Eugene Volokh, a UCLA law professor, said if the Logan Act were meant to apply to “public exhortations to foreign governments, it would pretty clearly violate modern First Amendment principles.”

Americans, including former officeholders, Volokh said, “have a right to publicly call for various governments to do or not do various things,” whether it’s calling on Israel to follow U.S. advice on Gaza or for Russia to free imprisoned Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich.

“More broadly, of course a campaigning public official has to be able to express his views about foreign policy, and statements to voters framed as demands to foreign officials are a pretty normal and constitutionally protected means of doing so,” Volokh said.

Volokh said if there were to be a Logan Act prosecution, a court would likely read the statute narrowly to focus on direct one-on-one negotiations. Interpreting it to include public statements, which in Trump’s case could be aimed just as much at a U.S. audience as at a foreign government, wouldn’t be “consistent with First Amendment law,” Volokh said.

We rate the claim that Trump violated the Logan Act by resharing an old Tweet directed at Iran’s then-leader False.

Last week, erroneous images from a weather forecast website showed massive waves forming between Antarctica and Africa, and some social media users linked them to the total solar eclipse. 

“Anomaly Coming From Antarctica the Day After Exlipse Producing 85ft Waves!!” misspelled text on the April 14 Facebook video read. 

In the video, a man shows a map visualization of a red mass that began near Antarctica and expanded as it moved toward South Africa. “The day after the eclipse, this massive anomaly shows up out from under Antarctica,” the man says. “As the day went on on the 9th, they grew, they grew, and they grew.” 

He then showed video footage of flooding in Cape Town, South Africa. The man said the waves were caused by alien aircraft. 

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 map images originated on a website called Ventusky that visualizes weather prediction data. Ventusky posted April 12 on X that the wave forecast was an error. 

“Despite numerous reports of UFOs or Atlanteans launching from the ocean, yesterday’s image of giant waves near Africa was due to a model error,” Ventusky wrote on X. “Fortunately our provider, the German Meteorological Institute @DWD_presse, has already resolved it, and the forecast is fine.” 

In another April 14 X post, Ventusky clarified that the error came from model data from DWD, short for Deutscher Wetterdienst, the German Weather Service.

Google reverse-image searches showed the images of flooding included in the Facebook post were from 2023 in South Africa. The same video footage of large waves breaking in South Africa were posted on X and Instagram in September 2023. 

We rate the claim that the day after the total solar eclipse, 85-foot waves traveled from Antarctica to South Africa False. 

An April 13 knife attack at a mall in Sydney, Australia, unleashed misleading claims about the attacker and his motives.

Speaking into a camera, a man in an April 13 Instagram reel said people would be seeing claims that the incident was an “Islamic terrorist attack.”

“As I explained in the previous video,” the man continued, “it is a Zionist attacker who attacked Jewish in a shopping mall area in Sydney … the guy’s name is Ben Cohen and he’s Jewish.”

He said the attacker carried out the incident to falsely suggest an Islamic terrorist had done it.

We saw similar claims on Facebook identifying the attacker as a “Jewish terrorist,” “a radical Jew, or “Benjamin Cohen.” On X, some posts described him as a “Zionist.”

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.)

That’s because none of this is accurate.

 

(Screenshot from Instagram)

Is the U.S. an outlier when it comes to paid leave? At least one Wisconsin state lawmaker says it is.  

“The United States is an outlier, one of only about half a dozen countries, without any guarantee of paid leave for new parents and/or other health care needs,” state Rep. Lisa Subeck, D-Madison, said Feb. 16 on X.

The statement was in support of a bill introduced by Democrats in the state Legislature to establish a paid family and medical leave insurance program in Wisconsin.

“With businesses across the state facing a shortage of workers, we must find ways to attract a talented and competitive workforce,” Subeck said in an email to PolitiFact Wisconsin. “A comprehensive paid family and medical leave policy in Wisconsin would be a game changer for businesses, for workers, and for our families.”

Let’s take a look at the issue of guaranteed leave for new parents — and whether the U.S. is an outlier when compared to other countries. 

No federally required paid leave

The Family and Medical Leave Act of 1993 (FMLA) requires 12 weeks of unpaid leave annually for parents of newborn or newly adopted children if the parents work for a company with 50 or more employees. In 2020 the policy was extended to caregivers of sick family members.

FMLA applies only to unpaid leave. What about paid leave?

The Federal Employee Paid Leave Act of 2019 provides a paid parental leave benefit to most (but not all) civilian employees who work for the federal government. 

Also, according to the Bipartisan Policy Center, 13 states and the District of Columbia have enacted mandatory paid family leave systems. An additional eight states have voluntary systems that provide paid family leave through private insurance.

Each of those, in their own ways, provides leave — but none is a national paid parental leave program.

Policy analysis

When asked to support the statement, Subeck pointed to a The New York Times article that obtained much of its data from the World Policy Analysis Center at UCLA.

The policy analysis notes that paid leave available to mothers includes both paid maternity leave, which is leave reserved for mothers of infants, and paid shared parental leave — which is leave available to either parent of an infant. 

It is important to note that although not required to do so, many employers provide paid leave for their employees. According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistice, from 27% to 30% of workers were provided paid family leave by their employers in 2023.

There is data for paid leave reserved for mothers of infants and for shared parental leave. The policy analysis center data reflect a review of laws in place as of January 2022

In the data illustrating paid leave available to mothers of infants, only two countries — the United States and Papua New Guinea — were in the category of no paid leave. 

A more recent report, issued in January 2024 by Velocity Global, placed the U.S. firmly in the category of worldwide outlier, as one of five countries that offer no federal compensation guarantees for maternity leave. Those five countries are the United States, Marshall Islands, Micronesia, Palau and Papua New Guinea

Previous fact checks

PolitiFact over the years has visited this topic several times: 

Jan. 20, 2015: Barack Obama says the United States is “the only advanced country on Earth” that doesn’t guarantee “paid maternity leave to our workers.” Rated Mostly True.

Aug. 22, 2017: Sen. Claire McCaskill, D-Mo., says, “We’re the only developed nation in the world that doesn’t have paid maternity leave.” Rated Mostly True. 

Jan. 28, 2021: Democratic Virginia state Sen. Jennifer Boysko says, ‘The United States is the only industrialized, modernized country that does not already have a paid family medical leave program in place.’” Rated True.

Our ruling

Subeck said “The United States is an outlier, one of only about half a dozen countries, without any guarantee of paid leave for new parents and/or other health care needs.” 

It’s accurate to say the U.S. does not have a law requiring guaranteed paid leave — though many states do, as well as many private businesses and companies. Likewise, very few countries are in the same boat. Nearly all of them have mandated paid leave programs.

We rate the statement True. 

 

 

Sorry, Joe Biden. As Taylor Swift might say, “You’re on your own, kid.” At least for now —  Swift still hasn’t endorsed anyone for president in 2024. Popular social media posts said otherwise, however.

“You’ve probably heard that Taylor Swift is endorsing Joe B,” posts from April 6 and April 11 said. Joe B is a reference to President Biden, who is seeking reelection for a second four-year term.

The Facebook 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.)

You have probably not heard Swift’s endorsement because it hasn’t happened. Swift endorsed Biden a month out from the 2020 presidential election but has not made a public endorsement in 2024.

On March 5, Super Tuesday, Swift posted a message to her 282 million Instagram followers encouraging them to vote, along with a link to the website of nonpartisan group Vote.org, which lets people find local polling stations and hours. She sent a similar get-out-the-vote message in 2023, after which Vote.org said it recorded 35,000 registrations.

Although some election watchers are reportedly eager to see Swift, whom Time named its 2023 Person of the Year, throw her support behind either Biden or his competitor, former President Donald Trump, experts told PolitiFact that they are skeptical that her involvement would tip the race decisively to her chosen candidate.

An endorsement would draw attention, but her fans already lean left. And for celebrity endorsements to move the needle in elections, there usually needs to be more than one action or message, experts said. Younger people exhibit consistently poor voter turnout. 

Swift endorsed Democrat Phil Bredesen in a 2018 Tennessee U.S. Senate race, but Bredesen lost that election to Republican Marsha Blackburn.

We rate the claim that Swift endorsed Biden False. 

PolitiFact Staff Writer Grace Abels contributed to this report.

In an effort to promote the U.S. semiconductor industry, President Joe Biden has often described it as a high-paying field.

During an April 8 speech at Madison Area Technical College in Madison, Wisconsin, he attached a dollar figure to it.

“Know what the average salary is?” Biden said. “$110,000. You don’t need a college degree.”

Amid a global semiconductor shortage, Biden in 2022 signed the bipartisan CHIPS and Science Act to help spur production and make the U.S. more competitive with China. In recent years, China’s government has stepped up its own support of the semiconductors industry, making it the U.S.’ chief rival in this area. 

Semiconductors, sometimes referred to as integrated circuits or microchips, are “the brains of modern electronics,” the Semiconductor Industry Association says, and found in laptops, cellphones, smartwatches and tablets. They are often made from silicon and are used in medical devices, computing, defense, transportation, clean energy, artificial intelligence and advanced wireless networks, the association says.  

But Biden’s take on the industry’s salary and the level of educational attainment is inaccurate. Data shows that those with no college degree typically earn less than $110,000 in the semiconductors field.

The industry in 2020 employed about 277,000 people in 49 states in design, manufacture, testing and research and development roles, according to a 2021 report by the Semiconductor Industry Association and Oxford Economics. The report described the average industry salary as around $170,000, based on data from the federal Bureau of Labor Statistics. 

We asked the White House for more information about the figure Biden cited but received no response. Biden has made similar statements before. In his 2023 State of the Union address, speaking specifically about Intel Corp. He said its new Columbus, Ohio, factory would create jobs that pay an average of $130,000 a year, many of which do not require a college degree. When Time asked Biden’s team about that figure, a senior administration official said it came from an “aggregate” of all jobs in the industry, ranging from those that require training certificates to those that require two- or four-year degrees. 

Gary Burtless, a senior fellow and economist at the Brookings Institution, a Washington, D.C., think tank, said he could not speak to whether the $110,000 figure Biden used was accurate but said it’s possible it includes all associated temporary construction jobs. The 2021 semiconductor industry report said federal funding was expected to spur the creation of about 6,200 temporary construction jobs over five years. Median annual income for construction jobs, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, starts at about $45,890 for laborers and goes up to $103,310 for managers.

The industry and Oxford analysis found that about 20% of people employed in the semiconductor industry have not attended college, 15% have some college experience, 9% have an associate degree and 56% have a bachelor’s or graduate degree. 

And although the report said that “workers consistently earn more than the U.S. average at all education attainment levels,” the report indicates that to earn the amount Biden claims, workers need an undergraduate or graduate degree.

The report outlined the maximum a worker could earn based on education level. 

Across all semiconductor industry jobs, people with a high school education or less could expect to earn a bit more than $40,000 a year on average. Employees with “some” college could earn up to $60,000 a year, and those with an associate degree could earn up to $70,000.

To achieve the $110,000 or higher that Biden described, employees need undergraduate or graduate degrees, the report said. People with undergraduate degrees can expect to make up to $120,000 and those with graduate degrees up to $160,000.

That said, the report also noted that, even when accounting for educational attainment, people make more money in the semiconductor field than in other fields. 

We also looked at the salaries listed in 2024 industry job postings. We found that a college degree is typically required for a salary in the $110,000 range. A few of the job postings we found as of April 12 are:

• Micron Technology: This Boise, Idaho-headquartered producer of computer memory and computer data storage on April 12 had an open position for an associate general counsel for trade compliance that requires a juris doctor, or law degree, and five to 10 years of experience. The salary range is $146,000 to $274,000.

Micron Technology also advertised for a principal interface design engineer, which requires at least a bachelor of science in electrical engineering and 10 years of experience. The salary range was $165,000 to $280,000.

• Qualcomm: A San Diego-based semiconductor company, Qualcomm had an open position for a senior administrative assistant that doesn’t necessarily require a degree, and it pays between $25.06 and $37.58 an hour. This would mean a maximum salary of about $78,000 a year if working 40 hours a week.

• GlobalFoundries: Headquartered in Malta, New York, GlobalFoundries advertised for an administrative assistant position that required at least a high school diploma or equivalent. The pay was listed at $31.99 per hour to $47.99 per hour. That would make the maximum annual salary around $100,000 if the hours were full-time.  

An open executive administrator position with an expected salary of $46,100 to $82,300. said it required “higher education or specialized training or certification.”

The company was also looking for an associate technician in its apprenticeship program. The post carried an expected salary of $31,300 to $54,000, and applicants must have “a high school education or equivalent” or a “high school tech center education.”

• Intel Corp.: Headquartered in Santa Clara, California, Intel in 2022 announced an investment of $20 billion in Ohio to build two new plants, for which it anticipated an average annual salary of $135,000. But this figure included all jobs, including those that require no college degree to those that require advanced degrees.

PolitiFact reached out to Micron, Qualcomm, GlobalFoundries and Intel but received no replies. 

Our ruling

Biden said the “average salary” for semiconductor industry jobs is “$110,000. You don’t need a college degree.”

A 2021 report said the average industry salary is around $170,000. But other data in that same analysis showed that people who have less than a bachelor’s degree were unlikely to make more than $70,000. 

People with no more than a high school diploma can expect to earn a bit more than $40,000 per year. People with “some” college could earn up to $60,000 a year, and those with an associate degree could increase that to $70,000. 

The statement contains an element of truth — the average salary in the field is even higher than he said — but it ignores critical facts about the educational attainment needed to reach that level of pay. We rate it Mostly False.

After Iran launched hundreds of missiles and drones against Israel, some social media users misleadingly claimed all the projectiles were completely blocked before reaching Israel.

An April 14 Threads post said, “How embarrassing for Iran that not even one rocket hit Israel. In fact one rocket landed back in Iran. LONG LIVE ISRAEL!!!”

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.)

(Screengrab from Threads)

Israeli military officials said 99% of the more than 300 missiles and drones launched by Iran and Iran-backed groups operating out of Yemen, Syria and Iraq were intercepted.

Over the course of five hours starting late April 13, Iran and its allies fired 170 drones, more than 30 cruise missiles and more than 120 ballistic missiles. Israel’s multilayered defense system, with support from the militaries of the U.S., the United Kingdom and France, intercepted most of the drones and missiles.

Israeli officials said “a small number” of ballistic missiles reached Israel, causing damage to a military base, CNN reported. One person was seriously injured in the attack: a 7-year-old girl living in a Bedouin community in Israel’s southern Negev desert, The New York Times reported. No deaths have been reported.

U.S. officials told The Wall Street Journal that about half of Iran’s ballistic missiles failed to launch or crashed before reaching their intended targets.

We rate the claim that “not even one rocket (from Iran) hit Israel” False.

After Iran launched hundreds of drones and ballistic missiles toward Israel late on April 13, some social media accounts circulated a video that they claimed showed dozens of people running and screaming in response to the attack. 

“Footage reportedly showing Israelis panicking after Iranian attacks reach #Israel,” read an April 13 Instagram video’s caption.

(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.)

PolitiFact reverse-image searched a frame of the video and found it appeared on other social media platforms, including X on April 13. The X post was tagged with a Community Note that read, “This is footage from outside the Four Seasons Hotel in Buenos Aires, Argentina.”

We verified the footage’s location by cross-checking the video with satellite imagery. We identified features in the video that matched features outside the Four Seasons Hotel Buenos Aires shown in the satellite image, such as surrounding buildings and the traffic light. The colors of the boxes show how they match up.

The green box shows the Four Seasons hotel. The red, yellow and blue boxes show the buildings surrounding it, and the orange box shows the traffic light captured in the video. The crosswalks are also visible on both videos.

(Screenshots from Google Earth, Instagram; exposure was turned up on Instagram screenshots to make features clearer.)

BBC reporter Shayan Sardarizadeh posted on X that the video showed fans of pop star Louis Tomlinson, a former member of the disbanded English-Irish boy band One Direction. We couldn’t find the original video, but Tomlinson’s official TikTok account posted a video April 7 captioned, “Meeting fans in Buenos Aires, Argentina.” 

An Israeli air base in the Negev desert was damaged, nearly all missiles and drones launched by Iran were intercepted by Israel’s defensive weapons systems and by its allies. A 7-year-old girl sustained the only critical injury reported so far.

The video doesn’t show “Israelis panicking” after Iran’s direct attack on Israel. We rate that claim False.

A social media post sharing a video of rockets firing in quick succession said it showed Iran’s April 13 attack on Israel. But it doesn’t.

“Iranian media shows rockets Fired at Israel,” read text in an April 14 Instagram video. 

(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.)

Reverse image search results showed that the video has been online since at least 2016. We found the same footage dated June 14, 2016, on a Russian website (timestamp: 0:31), with a caption that Google translated to: “News today ATO DPR Donbass Grad Armed Forces of Ukraine Shelling.”

We also saw the clip in a YouTube video uploaded Feb. 21, 2017, titled, “Night volley of Russian MLRS ‘Grad’. Fire!!!” Grad is a multiple launch rocket system, also called MLRS.

This video does not show Iran’s April 13 attack on Israel. We rate that claim False.