Category: Fact Check

Legislation enacted by New York state in 2022 requires most colleges and universities in the state to establish voting sites on or near campus. But a Bard College official who tracks the issue recently warned university presidents that little progress had been made on turning this mandate into reality.

In a February open letter to New York state’s college presidents, Jonathan Becker, vice president for academic affairs at Bard College and director of the Hudson Valley college’s Center for Civic Engagement, urged colleges to create polling locations on or near campus if they don’t exist already.

“Unfortunately, as two recent studies show, state and local election administrators have not adequately prioritized or fully implemented this critical voter protection legislation,” Becker wrote. “The vast majority of colleges in New York state do not have on-campus poll sites and there has been almost no change since the passage of this legislation.”

The two studies Becker cited show that the law has not been fully carried out. However, it’s unclear whether the schools without voting sites amount to “the vast majority” and difficulties in obtaining data on campus voting sites leave room for statistical uncertainty.

What the 2022 legislation required

Becker and other campus voting experts have long complained that boards of election, in New York state and elsewhere, have often imposed strict residency requirements and made voting sites inaccessible.

Bard — along with the Andrew Goodman Foundation, a New York City-based voting rights group named for one of the three voter-registration volunteers murdered in Mississippi in 1964 — has been involved in the issue for years, filing lawsuits in 2020 and 2021 to bring a polling place to campus.

“I think a lot of students don’t know that they can register to vote at their campus address,” said Caroline Smith, the Andrew Goodman Foundation’s programs director. “I think this is a major reason why students tend to vote absentee” in their home state rather than where they attend school.

The lawsuits prompted the inclusion of a provision in New York state’s 2023 budget that required colleges and universities with more than 300 registered voters on campus to have an on-campus polling location or one near the campus that was approved in coordination with the university. Democratic Gov. Kathy Hochul signed the budgetary legislation that included the provision in April 2022.

Becker told PolitiFact that both students and faculty members living on campus count toward the 300-voter threshold. The legislation also prevented campuses from being divided into multiple voting districts.

How much progress has been made?

Becker cited two studies showing that progress on applying the law has been incomplete. 

One study, published in February 2024 by Becker’s Center for Civic Engagement, found that almost half of New York’s 41 four-year public institutions with more than 1,000 students had regular or early voting sites. Twenty public universities had a polling location, and 21 did not. 

Four-year public institutions with on-campus polling sites included Binghamton University, Brooklyn College, Stony Brook University and University at Albany. Those that did not included the U.S. Merchant Marine Academy, the U.S. Military Academy at West Point and the University at Buffalo. 

The rate of on-campus voting sites was lower for the 64 private institutions with more than 600 undergraduates, at 22%. Sixteen private universities had a polling location; 48 did not. 

Private institutions with on-campus polling sites included Bard, Cornell University, New York University, Rochester Institute of Technology, Skidmore College, Syracuse University, Vassar College and Yeshiva University. Private institutions that did not have an on-campus site included Barnard College, Colgate University, Columbia College, Fordham University, Hamilton College, Hofstra University, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Sarah Lawrence College, St. Bonaventure University, St. John’s University and the University of Rochester.

A team from Rutgers Law School led by Yael Bromberg, a professor there, conducted the other study, which found a “minor increase (2.2%) in the presence of on-campus poll sites between the 2018 and 2022 elections, when the law came into effect.”

Becker, however, acknowledged some uncertainty.

Research challenges hobbled his center’s study. For instance, the researchers often couldn’t confirm the number of registered voters on campus. So, they used a workaround to make an estimate: They looked at colleges with 1,000 students and assumed that it was plausible that 300 of them would be registered voters who lived on campus. 

“We’re listing places which could meet the requirements,” Becker said. “We have no idea; that’s part of the whole story.”

The study also cautioned that other information was difficult to secure. 

Many colleges and universities “do not have information on poll site locations on their websites, and those that do often do not indicate if the poll sites are on a college campus,” the study said. “Calls to boards of election often went unanswered. When interviewers did speak to board representatives and requested basic public information, such as whether a poll site is situated on a college campus, answers were often withheld until a Freedom of Information Act request was filed. Even then, Freedom of Information Act requests often went unanswered.”

The Andrew Goodman Foundation’s Smith said such obstacles demand action from college presidents.

“Administrations will often focus on what’s being brought to their attention,” said Smith. “I think securing on-campus polling sites requires the active support and leadership of campus administration.”

Our ruling

Becker said, “The vast majority of colleges in New York State do not have on-campus poll sites.”

Two studies, one of them by his own group, support the idea that the 2022 law has not been fully applied. 

However, the difficulty of obtaining information about campus voting sites makes it unclear whether the “vast majority” of colleges and universities currently lack one.

We rate the statement Half True.

After a New York judge ordered former President Donald Trump to pay a $454 million penalty in a civil fraud case, social media users claimed one of Trump’s lawyers accused the judge of corruption.

A March 19 TikTok video showed still images of Alina Habba, an attorney representing Trump, and Arthur Engoron, the New York Supreme Court justice presiding over Trump’s civil business fraud case.

Text above the images read, “Awake yet? Donald Trump’s attorney, Alina Habba, just exposed Judge Arthur Engoron on her Telegram! He took a $10,000,000 BRIBE from Joe Biden’s shell companies to convict Donald Trump!”

TikTok identified this video as part of its efforts to counter inauthentic, misleading or false content. (Read more about PolitiFact’s partnership with TikTok.)

(Screengrab from TikTok)

This claim was also reshared multiple times on X.

In February, Engoron ruled that Trump and the Trump Organization must pay $454 million for fraudulently inflating Trump’s net worth. An appeals court lowered the bond to $175 million and Trump posted a bond in that amount April 1. New York Attorney General Letitia James has questioned the validity of Trump’s bond; Engoron scheduled a hearing April 22 to discuss it.

Although Habba has criticized Engoron’s ruling, there is no evidence she’s accused the judge of taking a bribe from Biden. Erica Knight, Habba’s spokesperson, told PolitiFact Habba made no such assertion. We also found no posts on Habba’s social media accounts or credible news coverage of her supposed bribery accusation.

We searched “Alina Habba” on Telegram and found at least 10 accounts — some with thousands of followers — using her name and likeness. None of these accounts are authentic because Habba doesn’t have a Telegram account, her spokesperson said.

(Screengrabs from Telegram)

The social media posts also wrongly claim that Engoron convicted Trump. Civil court cases, such as the one Trump lost in New York, can involve disputes about money and debts, property, injuries, marriage or children. Civil cases result in monetary damages or court orders, not convictions, which occur when people are found guilty in criminal cases.

We rate the claim that Habba said on Telegram that Engoron took a “$10 million bribe from Joe Biden’s shell companies to convict Donald Trump” False.

Videos en redes sociales comparten el audio de una supuesta llamada al 911 de un sobreviviente del derrumbe del puente Francis Scott Key en Baltimore el 26 de marzo. Pero está llamada no es real. 

“Llamada de emergencia, situación del accidente del barco,” dice el subtítulo de la publicación en Facebook del 27 de marzo. El video además de mostrar imágenes del puente Francis Scott Key y del barquero chocando contra la estructura, también muestra la imagen del supuesto sobreviviente hablando con la operadora del 911. 

Pero el hombre de la imagen no está relacionado con el suceso. Él es Donald Sahota, un policía que murió al ser disparado por otro oficial que trataba de detener al sospechoso de un robo en Vancouver, Washington, en 2022. 

La publicación fue marcada como parte del esfuerzo de Meta para combatir las noticias falsas y la desinformación en su plataforma. (Lea más sobre nuestra colaboración con Meta, propietaria de Facebook e Instagram).

El video en Facebook fue originalmente publicado en TikTok en inglés por el usuario @thedramatik, el video tiene más de 10 millones de vistas. Otros videos similares también fueron publicados en TikTok con subtítulos en español.

Expertos nos dijeron que el audio en las publicaciones fue generado con inteligencia artificial. 

En una parte del audio se escucha al hombre diciendo en inglés que su carro se está llenando de agua y que va a romper su ventana porque no puede salir. En ese momento se escuchan sonidos de agua supuestamente entrando al vehículo y de la ventana rompiéndose, pero estos sonidos son fabricados, dijo Valerie Wirtschafter, experta de Brookings Institution, una organización sin ánimo de lucro centrada en política pública.

“Para mi, es bastante claro que (el audio) fue generado”, porque la cadencia del habla parece fuera de lugar y hay poco sonido de fondo cuando se escucha al hombre supuestamente romper la ventana y el agua entrar, dijo Wirtschafter. 

Hafiz Malik, un profesor en el departamento de ingeniería eléctrica y computación en la University of Michigan-Dearborn le dijo a PolitiFact que luego de examinar el audio de forma forense, él encontró que fue generado con inteligencia artificial. Específicamente dijo que este es conocido como audio sintético generado con algún algoritmo.

(Captura de pantalla de publicacion en Facebook).

Malik dijo que la voz de la mujer en la llamada suena muy perfecta para ser de una persona real y que el audio de fondo en la conversación suena muy limpio, ya que normalmente cuando hay una conversación telefónica de dos personas se puede escuchar más ruido de fondo. Él también explicó que aunque el audio fue generado con IA, este luego fue editado por un humano para agregar ruido de fondo y filtrar la frecuencia del audio para que sonara como una llamada telefónica. 

Los profesores de la Universidad de Northwestern, Marco Postiglione y V.S. Subrahmanian, nos dijeron que según su análisis, el audio es un “deepfake”, un audio falso creado por computadora con inteligencia artificial.

Ellos explicaron que cuando el hombre en el audio dice “Hola, dios mío”, él no suena como si estuviera en pánico, ni tampoco se escucha su pánico en el resto del audio. 

También notaron que pasaron pocos segundos entre cuando el sujeto supuestamente rompió la ventana, salió y habló de nuevo con la operadora del 911. Esta es una respuesta muy rápida dada las circunstancias, ya que no es probable que alguien que estaba tratando de sobrevivir en el agua pudiera hablar por tanto tiempo, dijeron los expertos. 

Por último, dijeron que la voz de la operadora suena muy artificial y guionizada.

La publicación fue compartida el 27 de marzo, el mismo día en que la Guardia Costera de Estados Unidos y la Policía Estatal de Maryland  suspendieron la búsqueda de víctimas, ya que habían estado desaparecidos por mucho tiempo para estar vivos. 

En el puente habían ocho trabajadores cuando el buque lo chocó.Solo dos personas sobrevivieron al ser rescatados del río. Uno de ellos es un mexicano de 35 años, Julio Cervantes. Pero PolitiFact no encontró reportes verídicos de medios de comunicación ni de oficiales sobre la supuesta llamada de un sobreviviente al 911.

Nuestro veredicto

Un video en Facebook alega presentar audio de una llamada de emergencia de un hombre que sobrevivió el derrumbe del puente Francis Scott Key en Baltimore.

Pero eso no es cierto. Expertos nos dijeron que el audio de la supuesta llamada al 911 fue generado con inteligencia artificial. 

La imagen incluida en la publicación de la supuesta víctima en realidad es de un policía que murió en Vancouver, Washington, en 2022.

Por eso, calificamos la publicación como Ridícula y Falsa.

Lee más reportes de PolitiFact en Español.

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Debido a limitaciones técnicas, partes de nuestra página web aparecen en inglés. Estamos trabajando en mejorar la presentación.

Presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. accused President Joe Biden of being a greater “threat to democracy” than former President Donald Trump, arguing that Biden censored him.

“President Biden is the first candidate in history, the first president in history that has used the federal agencies to censor political speech or to censor his opponent,” Kennedy said in an April 1 interview on CNN. 

Kennedy, who is running as an independent, referred to his lawsuit against the federal government in which he alleges the government censored his social media statements against vaccines. A judge granted Kennedy’s request for a preliminary injunction in the case, although it was stayed pending a ruling in another case.

Biden, Kennedy said on CNN, “started censoring — not just me — but 37 hours after he took the oath of office, he was censoring me. No president in the country has ever done that.”

Kennedy then pivoted to a lawsuit two Republican-led states filed to challenge the federal government’s communications with social media companies. “The greatest threat to democracy is not somebody who questions election returns, but a president of the United States who uses the power of his office to force the social media companies … to censor his political critics,” he said.

There are a few problems with Kennedy’s statement. 

First, he wasn’t Biden’s political opponent in January 2021, when a Biden administration official noticed Kennedy posting an anti-vaccine conspiracy theory and contacted Twitter. Kennedy didn’t declare his presidential run until April 2023.

Second, history shows there have been other U.S. presidents who have taken far more extreme measures to silence political dissent. 

Third, the court cases that Kennedy alluded to remain pending; Kennedy can continue to freely make statements about vaccines. Experts told PolitiFact that the Biden administration’s efforts to get social media platforms to moderate false posts is not the same as censoring opponents.

We emailed the Kennedy campaign press team and received a response that our request for comment was under consideration.

Biden White House sought removal of COVID-19 misinformation

Kennedy wrote Jan. 22, 2021, on Twitter, that U.S. Baseball Hall of Famer Hank Aaron died as “part of a wave of suspicious deaths among elderly” following his COVID-19 vaccine. Aaron, 86, died from unrelated natural causes, a medical examiner found.

A Biden White House official emailed Twitter Jan. 23, 2021, and said, “Wondering if we can get moving on the process for having it removed ASAP.” 

At the time, social media companies including Twitter policies had developed policies to handle false or misleading claims about COVID-19. 

Kennedy’s post wasn’t removed; it is still live today. 

Instagram’s parent company disabled Kennedy’s personal Instagram account in February 2021 for spreading false claims about COVID-19 and vaccines, but restored it after he launched his presidential bid more than two years later. His Instagram account has nearly 2 million followers.

Courts weighing censorship question 

Kennedy, along with his legal advocacy group Children’s Health Defense and a Louisiana resident sued the administration in 2023, arguing that the government worked to have tech companies suppress First Amendment-protected speech, including items that could make the public “hesitant” toward COVID-19 vaccine mandates.

The lawsuit states that a Biden spokesperson accused Kennedy of “producing 65% of anti-vaccine misinformation on social-media platforms.”

The lawsuit is not only about COVID-19 posts or posts by Kennedy — it alleges that the government sought to suppress posts about the 2020 election and Hunter Biden’s laptop. The lawsuit says that “efforts by federal officers to induce social-media platforms to censor speech appear to have begun in 2020,” which would have been under Trump, and criticizes actions by the Biden administration, which started in January 2021. 

Although Kennedy received a preliminary injunction in the case, that February ruling was stayed until the U.S. Supreme Court rules in a related case brought by Missouri and Louisiana. The states accuse the Biden administration of breaching the First Amendment by discussing content moderation with social media companies, suppressing conservatives’ content about COVID-19 and voting by mail.

The Justice Department argued, “Social-media users have a First Amendment right to be free from governmental restrictions on their speech, but they have no First Amendment right to post content on private platforms that the platforms would prefer not to host.” 

Experts poke holes in ‘censorship’ characterization, but look to courts

Sheri Berman, a political science professor at Barnard College at Columbia University, said Kennedy’s being among the people spreading false or dangerous information does not mean that the Biden administration “was attacking him, as an individual citizen or as a potential opponent of Biden.”

Berman said it’s reasonable for citizens and candidates to debate how much social media moderation should exist. 

“However, general attempts to limit the spread of dangerous or false information about extremely sensitive and consequential topics — like elections results or the efficacy of vaccines during a pandemic — is not a threat to democracy,” Berman said.

Thomas Healy, a law professor at Seton Hall Law School, said the Supreme Court will ultimately resolve the question of whether the Biden administration engaged in censorship.

“The federal government is entitled to use the bully pulpit to advance its policy goals, and most modern administrations have done so,” Healy said. “Such communications would rise to the level of censorship only if the encouragement crossed the line into coercion, and that is a factual question.”

Two lower courts ruled that the government likely did engage in coercion, but a majority of the Supreme Court seemed skeptical of that claim during March oral arguments.

“Even if the Supreme Court agrees with the lower courts that the Biden administration violated the First Amendment, its actions are a far cry from the punishment of political opponents we have seen at earlier moments in American history and that Donald Trump has promised to pursue if reelected,” Healy said.

Past presidents took actions against the press

Whatever happens with the current court cases, history is clear about one thing: Past U.S. administrations have imposed far more extreme policies in response to government criticism. Four examples:

• President John Adams in 1798 signed the Sedition Act, which permitted the deportation, fine or imprisonment of anyone deemed a threat or who published “false, scandalous, or malicious writing” against the U.S. government.  Many newspaper editors who criticized Adams’ administration were prosecuted. The unpopular law contributed to Adams’ presidential election defeat in 1800, and the law expired. 

Steven Levitsky, a government professor at Harvard University, called Kennedy’s comparison baseless and “reckless.” “In Adams’ time,” he said, “newspapers were virtually the ONLY form of expression.” 

• President Woodrow Wilson signed the Sedition Act of 1918, which made it a crime to write or publish “any disloyal, profane, scurrilous, or abusive language” about the government or the war effort. Wilson’s Justice Department brought about 2,000 indictments under the Espionage and Sedition Acts of 1917 and 1918, Healy, the Seton Hall law professor, said. One of the people jailed under the acts was Eugene Debs, the Socialist Party leader who ran for president against Wilson in 1912. Debs was arrested in 1918 after giving an antiwar speech and convicted of violating the Espionage Act of 1917. He ran for president in 1920 under the Socialist Party banner from a federal prison in Alabama and his prison sentence was later commuted. 

In 1917, Wilson issued an executive order creating the Records of the Committee on Public Information, which was a “a vast effort in propaganda,” Boston University journalism professor Christopher Daly wrote.

• The Justice Department in the late 1940s and 1950s under Presidents Harry Truman and Dwight Eisenhower prosecuted the Communist Party of America’s leaders under the Smith Act, which made it a crime to advocate for the U.S. government’s overthrow by violence or force, Healy said. “The evidence against them showed that they were mainly teaching the doctrines of Marx and Lenin; there was no evidence that they were taking concrete steps to initiate a violent overthrow,” Healy said.

• President Abraham Lincoln in May 1864 issued an executive order commanding Union Army Maj. Gen. John A. Dix to “arrest and imprison in any fort or military prison in your command the editors, proprietors, and publishers” of newspapers that printed a forged presidential proclamation calling for the drafting of 400,000 more troops. News accounts at the time said newspaper offices were seized and at least one proprietor was arrested.

Our ruling

Kennedy said “President Biden is the first candidate in history, the first president in history, that has used the federal agencies to censor political speech … to censor his opponent.”

There are several factual issues with the claim. Kennedy was referring to a Biden administration official emailing Twitter in January 2021, asking the platform to remove Kennedy’s false post about the COVID-19 vaccine causing Hank Aaron’s death.

Kennedy didn’t announce his presidential candidacy for more than two years after that post, which remains live on Twitter.

Kennedy has sued the administration over its communications with social media companies. And courts are weighing whether these communications amount to censorship.

But even if someone deems the Biden administration’s actions censorship, Kennedy is wrong about history. Presidents Adams and Wilson signed sedition legislation that made it a crime to criticize the federal government. Those laws led to the prosecution of political figures, including Debs, who ran for president. Their actions also targeted the free press.

We rate this statement False. 

PolitiFact Copy Chief Matthew Crowley and Researcher Caryn Baird contributed to this fact-check.

RELATED: All of our fact-checks of Robert F Kennedy

RELATED: Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s campaign of conspiracy theories: PolitiFact’s 2023 Lie of the Year

Was the cost of living lower during Donald Trump’s tenure or Joe Biden’s current presidency? A graphic shared on social media tries to answer that question, but its data needs a second look. 

The Facebook image showed two columns: a red one labeled “HOW IT STARTED” for costs on the last day of Trump’s presidency and a blue one labeled “HOW IT’S GOING” for costs during Biden’s presidency “today.” According to the graphic, inflation, gasoline prices, mortgage rates, grocery prices and electricity costs have spiked while the Nasdaq composite stock index and “real average hourly earnings” have dropped. 

“Just in case you’re sitting on the fence,” words atop the March 10 graphic said, followed by an eye-rolling emoji.

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 post does not identify the graphic data’s source, although a watermark at the bottom says “Tom Tiffany.” On Sep. 28, 2022, U.S. Rep. Tom Tiffany, R-Wis., shared the same graphic on his X account. It doesn’t accurately reflect what was happening as of January 2021 or March 2024, as the post claims.  

Although many consumer prices have risen under Biden’s administration, as of March 10, many of the figures in the post were inaccurate. 

CLAIM: The inflation rate on Trump’s last day in office, Jan. 20, 2021, was 1.4%, and it’s 8.3% today. 

The graphic is close to reflecting  what was happening in 2021 but its 2024 figure is wrong. The inflation rate was about 1.4% when Trump left office and peaked in summer 2022, with Biden as president, reaching about 9% that June. But, by February 2024, the most recent month with available data, the inflation rate was 3.2%, well below the 8.3% claimed in the post.

CLAIM: Gasoline prices were $2.39 per gallon on Trump’s last day and are now $3.76 per gallon.

These numbers are slightly off. The nationwide average gasoline price in January 2021 was $2.42 per gallon, weekly U.S. Energy Information Administration data shows. For the week ending March 11, the average price of a gallon of gasoline was $3.49. 

CLAIM: The average 30-year mortgage rate was 2.65% under Trump and is now 7.08%

This is not far off, but it underrepresents the mortgage rate when Trump left office and overstates what it was in early March. The Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, which gathers weekly mortgage loan data, reported the average 30-year fixed-rate mortgage was at 2.77% when Trump left office and 6.88% on March 7. 

CLAIM: Average rent prices were $1,625 on Trump’s last day and are now $2,039.

The government does not track average national rental prices, but the claim differs from data collected by rental companies. 

A market report by Rent, a rental company, found that across the 50 largest cities in America,  the national average rental price in February 2024 was $1,981 and in January 2021 was $1,639. 

Data from the Apartment List, another website that helps renters find apartments, said that the average national median rent price in February was $1,377 and $1,144 in January 2021. The website’s estimates project rental prices in the future by using data from the Census Bureau’s American Community Survey about people who have recently moved. 

Both data sets found that there has been a roughly 18% increase in rent prices between February and the end of Trump’s presidency, not a 23% increase as the post claims. 

The site shows that the average rent hasn’t exceeded $2,000 since 2017. In

CLAIM: Grocery prices increased by 3.7% in January 2021 and are now up by 13.5%.

We aren’t sure what time period the post refers to but food prices have risen under Biden along with consumer prices. Overall food prices increased by 5.3% under Trump’s presidency and by 20.4% during Biden’s first three years in office, previous PolitiFact reporting found.

CLAIM: Electricity prices “rose” 1.5% under Trump compared to 15.8% under Biden.

Biden’s administration so far has seen larger increases in electricity prices than did Trump’s. During Trump’s presidency, the national average household electricity price rose by 4.22%, while it has risen by 30% so far under Biden, data by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics shows. 

CLAIM: Nasdaq was up 13,342 points when Trump left office and is now down 10,829 points.

This is way off. The Nasdaq composite stock index rose by 7,641 points between the first and last days of the Trump presidency. But the Nasdaq hasn’t fallen during Biden’s presidency; as of March 24, it was up by about 3,231 points.
 

CLAIM: Real average hourly earnings increased by 4% under Trump and decreased 2.8% under Biden. 

Median weekly inflation-adjusted wages for full-time workers increased by nearly 6% during Trump’s presidency, and although they’ve fallen under Biden, the current decline, about half a percent, is smaller than the post says. Given recent trends, the change under Biden is poised to return to zero and then turn positive within months.

PolitiFact has found that price changes are affected by factors other than who is in office, such as Federal Reserve interest rate hikes, global oil price swings and the coronavirus pandemic. 

PolitiFact Senior Correspondent Louis Jacobson contributed to this report.

The sight of U.S. Navy barges assisting a Coast Guard-led effort to clear the Francis Scott Key Bridge wreckage from the water and help reopen the Port of Baltimore had one social media user convinced it was a sign of war.

“The Navy doesn’t support the Coast Guard,” an April 1 Facebook post’s caption said. “The Coast Guard is a Department of Homeland Security during Peacetime. During WAR, the Coast Guard is transferred to the Department of Defense UNDER the Department of the NAVY. Tell the world it’s a Military Occupation without telling them it’s a MILITARY OCCUPATION.” 

The post shared a Stars and Stripes article detailing the Navy’s role in recovery efforts. The post’s author also shared a follow-up Facebook post linking to a Defense Department webpage about U.S. military forces to back the claim that the Coast Guard operates under the Navy during times of war.

The 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.)

During war, the Coast Guard — which is part of the U.S. armed forces and provides maritime safety and law enforcement and military naval support — operates under the Navy, rather than under the Department of Homeland Security. But that doesn’t mean that the Navy doesn’t support the Coast Guard at other times or that the two agencies’ cooperation is a sign of a military occupation or war.

(Facebook screenshot)

The Coast Guard-led Unified Command is coordinating efforts to clear bridge wreckage from the Fort McHenry Channel in the Patapsco River after the Key Bridge’s March 26 collapse. It’s working with the Navy, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and others, Deputy Pentagon Press Secretary Sabrina Singh told reporters April 1.

The joint effort includes several Maryland state and local agencies — such as the Maryland Transportation Authority — and a private sector emergency management consulting company, the Defense Department said in an April 1 news release. The Baltimore mayor’s office and Baltimore City Office of Emergency Management are also coordinating with the Unified Command.

A small U.S. Coast Guard response boat observes, March 30, 2024, as demolition crews cut the top portion of the collapsed Francis Scott Key Bridge for safe removal in the Baltimore’s Patapsco River.  (Coast Guard Petty Officer 3rd Class Kimberly Reave)

The Naval Sea Systems Command has contracted three barges already on the scene in Baltimore with more cranes and support vessels on the way. They’ll be used by the Navy’s Supervisor of Salvage and Diving to remove parts of the bridge from the water, the Navy said in a March 29 news release.

William Donahue, a spokesperson for the Joint Information Center in the Unified Command, told PolitiFact the Baltimore efforts are an example of a typical “whole of government response” to disasters.

Donahue said each agency brings a skill set that other agencies might not have. The Navy brings salvage work, the Army Corps of Engineers does surveying and is in charge of debris removal and the Coast Guard is opening the channels, he said. 

“It’s essentially a rich tapestry. We all work together,” Donahue said. Joint efforts between military branches such as this are not unusual.

“The Navy routinely assists with operations inside the United States,” Defense Department spokesperson Martin Meiners wrote to PolitiFact in an email. 

After wildfires devastated the Hawaiian island in August 2023, the military mobilized its forces to aid in recovery efforts. The Navy’s maritime strike squadron sent two MH-60R Seahawk helicopters to assist the Coast Guard’s search and recovery efforts. A team of Navy divers also assisted in the search for remains and underwater salvage operations in Lahaina harbor. 

Donahue pointed to the military response to Hurricane Katrina in 2005 and the Deepwater Horizon explosion and oil spill in 2010 as other examples of multiple agencies responding “to something that’s beyond the scope of any individual agency, but by working together we can get the job done.”

More than 60,000 troops and Defense Department civilians aided in recovery efforts in New Orleans and the U.S. Gulf Coast post-Katrina. The Coast Guard and Navy were part of a government-wide response to the Deepwater Horizon spill in the Gulf of Mexico, the worst oil spill in U.S. history.

A Navy spokesperson told PolitiFact in an email that the Navy and Coast Guard consistently operate together and the Navy is ready to support any contingency around the globe. The spokesperson pointed to joint efforts in 2007 after Minnesota’s Interstate-35W bridge collapsed as an example of the Navy and Coast Guard cooperating in the recovery.

We rate the claim that it’s a sign of war or military occupation that the Navy is supporting the Coast Guard in the Key Bridge cleanup False.

Former President Donald Trump, Elon Musk and Republican influencers all amplified a false claim on social media that suggests 2 million noncitizens have registered to vote without photo ID in three swing states this year. 

An Instagram post included screenshots of X posts from DC_Draino and End Wokeness, two popular social media accounts that we have previously fact checked.

“Over 8 million illegal aliens have invaded America under Biden,” the screenshot of the DC_Draino X image read. “Now we learn more than 2 million voter registrations have been completed *WITHOUT VOTER ID* in the past 3 months in 3 crucial states for 2024. Arizona, Pennsylvania, and Texas. Now you know why the border is open.”

The post’s second slide contains a screenshot from End Wokeness that was reshared by Elon Musk on X with the text “extremely concerning.” Musk has repeatedly shared voting and immigration misinformation on the platform he owns. 

The End Wokeness post claimed, “The number of voters registering without a photo ID is SKYROCKETING in 3 key swing states: Arizona, Texas, and Pennsylvania. Since the start of 2024: TX: 1,250,710 PA: 580,513 AZ: 220,731.”

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 saw similar statements on X, TikTok and Facebook. On Truth Social,former President Donald Trump asked who are the millions of voters registering without photo ID.

The figures in the social posts represent the number of times states have verified voters’ Social Security numbers. This process is done with the Help America Vote Verification (HAVV). HAVV is a system established in 2004 where states can verify a voter’s identification with the Social Security Administration. 

State or local election officials in the three states — including Republicans — said that the figures do not accurately reflect the number of voters’ who registered without photo ID. All of the election officials said they take steps to ensure that only eligible citizens cast ballots and had no evidence of widespread voter registration by noncitizens.

“The data does not represent the numbers of newly registered voters, and any representation they do is false,” Ellen Lyon, a spokesperson at Pennsylvania’s Department of State, told PolitiFact. 

We told the End Wokeness social media user that voting officials from the three states said the data was misrepresented in the social post. The author of the account responded by saying “it is deeply concerning that ANYONE is registering to vote without a photo ID” and criticized mail-in voting. Texas and Arizona require a photo ID to vote, but Pennsylvania does not.

The Social Security Administration’s press office did not immediately respond to our questions about the data. 

States also use the system to verify new voters who do not use a photo ID when registering to vote. As a result, the same voter’s Social Security number could be potentially verified multiple times in one year.

For example, in Pennsylvania, according to the Department of State, there have only been 75,000 new voter registrations, making it impossible that 580,513 voters registered without photo ID as the claim asserts.

“In Pennsylvania, the Department of State uses the Help America Vote Verification (HAVV) to check partial social security numbers (SSN) not only for voter registration applications, but also for absentee and mail ballot applications,” Lyon said. 

The Social Security Administration’s data represents the raw number of times a state checks a voter’s social security verification. The database also does not show the number of noncitizens who registered this year without a photo ID. Nor does it verify their citizenship status. 

In Texas, only 57,711 new voters have registered this year, according to Secretary of State Jane Nelson, a former Republican state senator. 

Her office released a statement earlier this month calling the 1.2 million figure in social media posts “clearly incorrect.” 

“When Texans register to vote they must provide a driver license number or a Social Security number. When an individual registers to vote with just a SSN, the state verifies that the SSN is authentic,” the statement explained.

Arizona has taken similar steps to counter the inaccurate social media claims.

Stephen Richer, Arizona’s Republican Maricopa County Recorder, replied to Musk’s post on X, explaining how the claim is inaccurate. 

“There is 0 validity to the suggestion in the original post that 220,731 illegal immigrants have registered in Arizona in 2024,” Richer wrote.

Richer said that in Arizona there have only been about 60,000 new voter registrations this year and Social Security verifications are used to check proof of identity, not to check citizenship status.

Screenshot from X

JP Martin, a spokesperson for Arizona’s secretary of state, told PolitiFact that 90% of verification of citizenship proof is done through the Motor Vehicles Division in Arizona, not through the Social Security Administration. In an Arizona voting case, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in 2013 that states are obligated to permit registration for federal elections using a federal form that does not require documentary proof of citizenship. That means that Arizona provides voters who lack proof with a “federal only” ballot. The state has about 35,000 people on the federal only list out of the roughly 4 million voters, Martin said. 

That number is nearly eight times smaller than the amount of HAVV queries that were made to verify voter’s Social Security numbers. 

An article by Votebeat Arizona found that the majority of federal-only voters in Arizona are college-age students who may not be able to easily access documents that prove their citizenship. 

Amid a high number of border encounters this year, viral social media accounts and some politicians including Trump have continued to spread the long-standing falsehood of mass voting by noncitizens.

Noncitizens occasionally cast ballots, but this is rare. Most noncitizens don’t want to risk jail time (or deportation if they are here illegally) by casting a ballot. Election officials take several steps to ensure that only eligible voters cast ballots.  

Our ruling

An Instagram post claims that the Social Security Administration’s data proves that more than 2 million noncitizens registered to vote without photo ID in Arizona, Pennsylvania and Texas this year.

But the data does not reflect the number of noncitizens who have registered to vote without a photo ID. The data shows the amount of times states have verified voters’ Social Security numbers. States can request to verify the same voter’s Social Security number multiple times. 

State officials from Arizona, Pennsylvania and Texas said the numbers of people who registered to vote this year in their respective states are significantly smaller than the figures cited in the post. 

We rate this claim False. 

PolitiFact Senior Correspondent Amy Sherman contributed to this report. 

Captured at a distance, the video clip shows a man with his back to the camera, pointing and talking to Gov. Kathy Hochul, D-N.Y., with a few onlookers. Viewers hear only ambient wind noise until the 27-second clip ends with the sound of people clapping as the two part ways. 

It isn’t immediately apparent what the video shows. Conservative commentator Benny Johnson posted it on Facebook with his interpretation, writing to his 2 million followers that it showed “New York Governor Kathy Hochul being denied entry into the wake for slain NYPD officer Jonathan Diller.”

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.)

Diller, 31, was shot and killed during a March 25 traffic stop. Thousands of people attended his wake, including politicians such as former President Donald Trump, New York City Mayor Eric Adams and Hochul. 

Johnson’s description of the video is inaccurate. We contacted him for comment and did not hear back by deadline.

(Screenshot from Facebook.)

The video shows a man confronting Hochul as she left Diller’s wake, media reports show. It does not show someone denying her entry to pay her respects. 

“Gov. Kathy Hochul was filmed being confronted by an emotional mourner on her way out of a short visit to the wake for slain NYPD hero Jonathan Diller Friday afternoon — with bystanders applauding as she made her exit,” read the New York Post story that included the same footage.

The man’s identity has not been confirmed.

The New York Post and other news outlets reported that Hochul attended the wake. 

A Hochul spokesperson told CBS News the governor attended the officer’s wake to “offer her condolences and hear from his loved ones who are dealing with unimaginable grief.” 

Hochul said her team asked the families before attending the wake. 

“We were told the family is welcoming,” Hochul said, according to Politico. “We always check, and they said to come, and I went. And no one told me to leave.”

Hochul said she “did a lot of listening” in the wake room.

“But I had to do that. It was important for me to be there for them and to listen to what they wanted to say to the governor of New York,” Politico reported her saying.

As Hochul exited the wake, the unidentified man stopped her on the way to her vehicle. She didn’t say what was discussed, Politico reported.

The video shows a confrontation that happened as Hochul was leaving the event, so we rate claims that the video showed someone denying Hochul entry to Diller’s wake False.

On TikTok and Instagram, viral videos show a man telling people that there’s a legal way for them to invade an abandoned house.

“I found out that there is a law that says that if a house is not inhabited we can expropriate it,” the influencer Leonel Moreno, who goes by “Leito Oficial” says in Spanish on a March 16 Instagram video.

Moreno is a Venezuelan migrant who came to the U.S. in 2022. His 2023  videos telling people how to “take advantage of the U.S. system” went viral.

An Immigration and Customs Enforcement spokesperson told PolitiFact that Moreno was placed into an Alternatives to Detention program after he arrived in the U.S. That program required him to report to an Enforcement and Removal Operations Office within 60 days of his U.S. arrival. Because he didn’t report to the office, immigration officers arrested Moreno on March 29 in Gahanna, Ohio. He is  detained pending further immigration proceedings, the ICE spokesperson said on April 4. 

In the Instagram video, Moreno said taking over houses will help people avoid living on the streets or burdening the public. He added that a law says people can take an abandoned deteriorated house, repair and live in it, and eventually be able to sell it.

The conservative X account Libs of TikTok, which has about 3 million followers, reposted the video with the caption: “Holy smokes. Tiktoker is advising illegals on how to take over Americans’ homes via progressive squatters’ rights laws. This tiktoker boasts that his friends already took over 7 homes. Unreal.”

Other Instagram users with thousands of followers also shared the video. 

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.)

No federal law allows seizure of abandoned houses, squatter rights vary by state

There is no U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development authority that lets a person take over an uninhabited house, a department spokesperson told PolitiFact. Experts also told us that there’s no federal law that lets people take over abandoned houses.

But Moreno appears to be referring to adverse possession laws, commonly called squatters’ rights.

All 50 states have adverse possession laws. Each state has its own rules on how property owners can remove squatters, and how squatters can take possession of a property.

These laws apply when a person has illegally occupied a space for a specific amount of time; in some states that’s seven years, in others up to 20 years.

A squatter can be someone who stops paying rent or who enters a property and occupies it without lawful documentation or permission to be there. However, former tenants cannot apply for adverse possession because they were initially in the property with the owner’s permission.

Some states, such as Georgia, Illinois and Wisconsin, require showing “good faith” to take adverse possession. In other words, the people claiming the property must demonstrate that they had basis to believe that they own the property, even if they were mistaken. 

Typically, to obtain adverse possession, people must have lived in a house for a continuous period and have occupied the property without permission. It  must also be obvious to the owner that the occupants are in there. 

Squatters can make a case for an adverse possession claim if they provide evidence that they’ve paid the property’s taxes or utility bills. A difference between a squatter and a trespasser is that a trespasser  breaks into a property to vandalize it or stays there briefly. 

How adverse possession rules vary

PolitiFact examined adverse possession laws in several large states. 

We found that in most states, squatters can be prosecuted for trespassing, usually a misdemeanor. 

Some states have criminalized squatting. On March 27, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis signed into law H.B. 621, which lets homeowners ask law enforcement to immediately remove squatters from their property. The law, which takes effect July 1, criminalizes causing $1,000 or more in damage to a property unlawfully occupied, using false documentation to stay in or to list the property and making false written statements to obtain property rights.

Jose Rivas, a criminal defense attorney in Florida, told PolitiFact that the Instagram video misinforms viewers, because in Florida, squatters can be charged with trespassing.

“In the context of the video, the actual owner will have plenty of opportunity to remove an illegal occupant (‘squatter’) before a squatter would be able to take ownership,” said Shawn Eaton, operations director at Eaton Realty, a Florida real estate company. 

In Florida, if squatters want to claim a house that isn’t theirs, they can do so after living there seven years (even if they are illegally in the country), but they must pay property taxes and only one person can claim the property, according to World Population Review, an independent organization that publishes and analyzes demographic data.

In New York City, where many newly arrived migrants have settled, people may claim adverse possession regardless of their immigration status. If someone stays without permission in a property for more than 30 days, the owner must provide a written 10-day eviction notice. If a person has occupied the property without permission for fewer than 30 days, a written notice isn’t required.

Someone who came illegally to the U.S., or anyone else, can claim adverse possession in New York, but the person will have to “show clear and convincing evidence, which is a very high standard, that you have exclusively occupied the property for 10 or more years, continuously,” said Joshua Price, a New York real estate attorney. 

“You can’t, you can’t just move into somebody’s house and say, ‘I’m here now, adverse possession, I own this house,’ Price said. “It doesn’t work like that.”

In Texas, it can take at least three years for a squatter to obtain a property title under adverse possession, depending on how long the property has been occupied. People in the country illegally can also use this law to try to take ownership of a property, said Teri A. Walter, a civil trial lawyer in Texas. 

“Citizenship is not an element of adverse possession under any statute, so it doesn’t matter,” Walter said.

One mistake people often make when they file for adverse possession claims is saying they share the property with someone else, Walter said. In Texas, people cannot claim possession if they allow other trespassers or claimants inside the property, she said.

In California, squatters can claim a property after living in it for five years, making house improvements and paying taxes. The owners have  to know the squatters are there without their consent. In other states, such as Illinois, people must continuously occupy the property for 20 years before claiming legal ownership.

The Instagram video omits these nuances and details and makes it sound as if legally taking over an abandoned house is as straightforward, and easy, as walking into it.

Our ruling

An Instagram post claims that a U.S. law says that “if a house is not inhabited, we can expropriate it.”

People can try to move into abandoned houses, but property owners would have an opportunity to remove them before they could file for ownership, experts said. People in these houses could also be charged with trespassing, depending on the state.

Some states’ adverse possession laws pave the way for people to eventually own a house they didn’t buy or legally inherit. But the Instagram post leaves out significant legal context.

We rate this claim Mostly False. 

 

Independent presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. on April 5 espoused a common falsehood about the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol.

“I have not examined the evidence in detail, but reasonable people, including Trump opponents, tell me there is little evidence of a true insurrection,” Kennedy said in his April 5 statement. “They observe that the protestors carried no weapons, had no plans or ability to seize the reins of government, and that (former President Donald) Trump himself had urged them to protest ‘peacefully.’”

Kennedy published the statement following a fundraising email earlier in the week that referred to Jan. 6, 2021, defendants as “activists” who had been “stripped of their Constitutional liberties.” (PolitiFact did not see the fundraising email directly but multiple news outlets reported on it, including CNN and NBC.)

In July 2021, we fact-checked Trump who said “there were no guns whatsoever” at the Capitol riot on Jan. 6. We rated his statement False. 

Kennedy’s statement goes further than Trump, because he said protesters “carried no weapons.” A weapon doesn’t have to be a gun.

About six months after the Capitol attack, PolitiFact reviewed the case files of approximately 430 defendants. We found several defendants who police say were found to have brought firearms with them. Some were charged with having firearms on Capitol grounds.

Court records in the cases of nearly 1,400 defendants now provide even more details about the defendants who carried weapons.

Marking 39 months since the attack, the U.S. Attorney’s Office on April 5 wrote that “approximately 493 defendants have been charged with assaulting, resisting, or impeding officers or employees, including approximately 129 individuals who have been charged with using a deadly or dangerous weapon or causing serious bodily injury to an officer.” (The office publishes a monthly update about the cases; the statement was not in response to Kennedy’s comments.)

A Justice Department spokesperson told PolitiFact that John Banuelos was the 10th person accused of bringing weapons to Washington, D.C., for the insurrection. He was charged in March 2024.

We searched Justice Department press releases and the federal government’s database of cases to find several examples of defendants who had weapons at the Capitol grounds Jan. 6:

• Mark Mazza was ​​convicted of carrying two loaded guns on Capitol grounds and assaulting law enforcement officers. Mazza brought a Taurus revolver, loaded with three shotgun shells and two hollow point bullets to the Capitol. He admitted to law enforcement that he was also armed with a second firearm, a loaded .40 caliber semi-automatic pistol.  

• Guy Wesley Reffitt was found guilty by a jury in 2022 of five charges including entering and remaining in a restricted building or grounds with a firearm.

• Christopher Michael Alberts was convicted of nine charges, including six felonies. He was found in possession of a firearm. Alberts arrived at the Capitol with a pocketknife and carried with him, in a holster, a 9-millimeter pistol loaded with 12 rounds of ammunition and an additional bullet in the chamber. Alberts also wore a separate holster containing an additional 12 rounds of ammunition.

• Jerod Thomas Bargar pleaded guilty to one felony count of entering and remaining in a restricted building or grounds with a deadly or dangerous weapon. Bargar entered onto the restricted Capitol grounds while illegally carrying a loaded, 9-millimeter semi-automatic pistol.

• Peter Francis Stager pleaded guilty to assaulting, resisting, or impeding certain officers using a deadly or dangerous weapon. “Stager watched as co-defendants attacked the police line and dragged a police officer, facedown and headfirst, out of the line and into the crowd of rioters,” a U.S. Attorney’s Office press release stated. Once the others had dragged the officer into the crowd, Stager raised the flagpole that he was carrying and beat the downed police officer, striking him at least three times.

• Robert Sanford Jr., a retired firefighter, was sentenced for assaulting law enforcement officers with a dangerous weapon. He “threw a fire extinguisher at a group of U.S. Capitol Police officers, striking three of them in the head,” a U.S. Attorney’s Office press release stated.

• Riley Kasper was sentenced for assaulting law enforcement officers. Kasper sprayed an aerosol canister of bear spray toward law enforcement officers. He “described the image of himself holding the can of bear spray against officers as making him look like a “badass,” a press release stated.

Our ruling

Kennedy said that on Jan. 6, 2021, U.S. Capitol “protestors carried no weapons.”

More than three years after the attack, we have more information than ever as to why this claim is wrong. The U.S. Attorney’s Office said that as of April 5, there had been approximately 129 people charged with using deadly or dangerous weapons or causing serious bodily injury to an officer that day.

And we found numerous examples of convicted defendants who brought firearms or used other weapons. 

We rate this statement Pants on Fire!

RELATED: All of our fact-checks about Jan. 6