Tag: United States

These days, military conflict is often accompanied by misinformation that bills fictitious scenes from video games as real depictions of fighting.

The conflict between Israel and Hamas is no exception. 

The caption on an Oct. 7 Facebook video says the footage shows “Palestinian freedom fighters shot down 4 Israelis fighter jets.” 

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)

But scrutiny of the video reveals it is a simulation, with a few Facebook commenters saying the clip is from a video game and one describing the video as “terrible cgi” (computer generated imagery).

Those commenters have strong fact-checking instincts, and their observations are correct. 

The same clip was shared Oct. 3 on YouTube, titled, “Two combat helicopters shot down by anti aircraft defense – Arma” — four days before Hamas launched its attack on Israel. 

“This not representative of reality it is just a simulation in the video,” read part of the YouTube video’s description. One hashtag on the video read “#arma3.”

(Screenshot from YouTube)

Arma 3 is a video game that describes itself as “a combined arms military game set in a massive military sandbox.” On X, formerly Twitter, Arma 3 says it offers players “true combat gameplay in a military sandbox.”

PolitiFact has debunked many claims that clips from video games showed real war footage, several following Russia’s February 2022 invasion of Ukraine. In many instances, those clips were also traced back to Arma 3. 

We rate claims that this footage shows “Palestinian freedom fighters shot down 4 Israelis fighter jets” False.

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Diversos videos muestran imágenes de una tormenta de nieve causada por un frente de aire ártico y están siendo difundidos en Facebook como actuales. Pero no es así.

“Ultimas noticias EEUU ¡CONGELAMIENTO TOTAL AMENAZA! Nieve apocalíptica”, dice el video del 23 de septiembre. 

“70% del territorio de Estados Unidos podría quedar bajo el hielo”, dice el narrador. 

El narrador del video que tiene aspecto de noticiero presenta la situación mientras aparecen imágenes de una tormenta de nieve. Asimismo, el término “Últimas noticias” aparece en el título, por lo que da a entender que se trata de algo actual. 

El video también dice que “sigue aumentando el número de víctimas mortales por el paso de la tormenta que estos últimos días ha asolado Estados Unidos”. A lo que añadía, “millones de ciudadanos han visto como el día de Navidad se convertía en una pesadilla tras el paso de Eliot”. 

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).

En 2023, no se ha declarado estado de emergencia por la llegada de una tormenta de nieve en los Estados Unidos. Esto pasó en diciembre de 2022, cuando una gran tormenta helada, conocida como ‘bomba ciclónica’, dejó a alrededor de 1.5 millones de hogares sin luz. 

La tormenta provocó que en los Estados Unidos se viviera la Navidad más fría desde los años 80, con temperaturas de hasta 50 grados bajo cero en Idaho, el lugar donde se detectó más frío, según el Servicio Nacional de Meteorología (NWS, por sus siglas en inglés). NWS clasificó la tormenta como “única en una generación”.

Actualmente, los canales oficiales del Servicio Nacional de Meteorología de los Estados Unidos no informan de ninguna alerta meteorológica por tormenta helada.

Calificamos el video como Falso. 

Lea más reportes de PolitiFact en Español aquí.

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

Republicans are criticizing the Biden administration after Hamas militants launched the deadliest attack on Israel in years. President Joe Biden’s critics claim that a recent hostage-release agreement provided Iran with access to $6 billion in frozen funds, and that, as a result, that money could have helped Iran fund Hamas’ attack.

Neither Israel nor the White House have said that there’s a direct link between Iran and Hamas’ attack on Israel. But Iran is a longtime supporter of Hamas. And a Hamas spokesperson told the BBC that Iran gave “direct” backing.

“The Biden Administration must be held accountable for its appeasement of these Hamas terrorists, including handing over billions of dollars to them and their Iranian backers,” U.S. Rep. Steve Scalise, R-La., wrote on X Oct. 7. Scalise, the House majority leader, is one of two candidates for House speaker.

The Biden Administration must be held accountable for its appeasement of these Hamas terrorists, including handing over billions of dollars to them and their Iranian backers.

— Steve Scalise (@SteveScalise) October 7, 2023

Several GOP presidential contenders, including former President Donald Trump speaking in New Hampshire, also argued that Biden emboldened Iran to aid the surprise attack.

On NBC’s “Meet the Press,” Nikki Haley, the former South Carolina governor and United Nations ambassador, criticized U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken, saying she thought it was “irresponsible” for Blinken to downplay the $6 billion. 

“I mean, let’s be honest with the American people and understand that Hamas knows and Iran knows they’re moving money around as we speak because they know $6 billion is going to be released,” Haley said Oct. 8. “That’s the reality.”

And in an Oct. 7 video on X, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis said, “Iran has helped fund this war against Israel and Joe Biden’s policies that have gone easy on Iran have helped fill their coffers.” 

Experts told PolitiFact that the question of whether the hostage deal was wise, and any connection it may have had to Hamas’ assault, is difficult to answer. They said that both the White House and Republican critics have valid points.

Here’s an analysis of several key elements of the dispute.

Where does the $6 billion figure come from?

In August, the U.S. announced an agreement with Iran to secure freedom for five U.S. citizens who’d been detained in the country in exchange for allowing Iran to access $6 billion of its own funds that had been frozen in South Korean banks. 

The money consisted of Iranian oil revenue frozen since 2019, when Trump imposed a ban on Iranian oil exports and sanctions on its banking sector. (It was not, as some have suggested, U.S. taxpayer money.)

The agreement also included the release of five Iranians held in U.S. prisons.

Even before Hamas’ Oct. 7 attack, the agreement was politically divisive, with Biden supporters praising the return of the hostages and critics saying that the payment amounted to a ransom that would encourage future hostage-taking.

But the Biden administration rebutted the notion that the agreement hastened or aided the Oct. 7 attack, flagging two key points.

On the Oct. 8 edition of “Fox News Sunday,” John Finer, the Biden administration’s deputy national security adviser, rejected “any implication” that money that hasn’t been spent yet could have “had any role in the attacks that took place — in planning them, in equipping the parties that conducted them.”

First, the money hasn’t been disbursed to Iran yet. When the freed Americans arrived in the U.S. in mid-September, the Iranian money was deposited into a restricted Qatari bank account. Qatar’s central bank is overseeing the funds, and Iran has not accessed the money, according to U.S. officials.

Second, the deal required that Iran would be able to access this money only to pay for humanitarian items, such as medicine and food.

Is there evidence linking Iran to the Hamas attack in Israel?  

The U.S. has said it hasn’t seen definitive proof of Iranian involvement, but is investigating possible connections. Because Hamas and Iran are longtime allies, it’s plausible that Iran helped Hamas design or carry out the attacks.

The sophistication and scale of the attack by Hamas, an Islamist militant group that controls Gaza, suggests that Hamas might have benefited from Iranian assistance. Assailants hit Israel by land, air and sea, leaving at least 900 Israelis dead. Iran applauded the operation but denied involvement.

A Hamas spokesperson told the BBC the group received direct support from Iran to conduct its attack. The Wall Street Journal reported that Iranian security officials helped plan and execute the assault. 

But experts said any specific connection between the $6 billion and the Hamas attack is uncertain, because whatever support Iran would be providing Hamas would almost certainly have occurred with or without the hostage deal.

Despite having reservations about the hostage agreement’s merits, “I don’t see any tangible connection between the $6 billion and this Hamas war,” said Matthew Levitt, a senior fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, a think tank focused on the Middle East.  

“Iran was already spending significant funds on Hamas and Hezbollah (another Iranian-backed terrorist group based in Lebanon) before this deal,” Levitt added. For years, Iran’s government has “prioritized supporting militant and terrorist proxies over providing services for its own people,” he said.

John Pike, director of the nonprofit think tank globalsecurity.org, said Hamas would not necessarily have needed a share of the $6 billion to mount its attack.

“Paragliders are cheap, and Hamas already had the rockets,” Pike said.

Why do critics say Iran, or Hamas, might benefit anyway from the $6 billion?

Biden’s critics argue that Hamas could indirectly benefit from money that Iran will eventually be able to secure from the hostage deal.

For starters, confirming that the money is withdrawn only for humanitarian purposes is easier said than done, experts said.

The U.S. Treasury Department said most details on the verification process are not public. However, a spokesperson pointed us to the Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control, which has said the process is similar to other humanitarian channels established under previous presidential administrations, and that it is designed with “stringent due diligence measures that guard against money laundering, misuse, and evasion of U.S. sanctions.” 

In September, the White House said that it would lock Iran’s funds if it tried to divert them for nonhumanitarian purposes.

But Biden critics’ core argument is that money is fungible. That means that once you have money or expect to get money soon, you can spend it however you want. 

“The safeguards in place are surely good enough to make sure only legitimate goods are purchased using those funds,” Levitt said. “But nobody can say what’s then done with those goods.”

Foreign policy analysts told PolitiFact that fungibility is a legitimate concern in this case.

“If you had a large end-of-year bonus payment coming your way, might you start spending more money in the meantime? Of course. Money is fungible,” said Matthew Kroenig, a Georgetown University professor of government and foreign service.

This is especially true in a country with a highly centralized economy and government, Levitt added. The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, an influential military branch within Iran, “controls so much of the Iranian economy, there’s no way to have comfort (that) the goods aren’t sold and some funds go to underwrite militancy.”

Speaking to supporters in New Hampshire, former President Donald Trump blamed President Joe Biden for Hamas’ attacks in Israel and asserted that New Hampshire — and the nation — were far better off under his administration.

“The attack on Israel would never ever have happened. The attack on Ukraine … inflation would never have happened. None of it would have happened,” Trump said Oct. 9 at Kingswood Arts Center in Wolfeboro. “We would have been a different country.” 

We can’t rate Trump’s hypothetical boasts on our Truth-O-Meter. But working with PolitiFact partner WMUR-TV, we fact-checked several of Trump’s statements, including his claims about New Hampshire drug overdoses, Hamas and the U.S. southern border wall.

Trump is the front-runner in polls measuring his appeal in a crowded field of Republican competitors. 

Claim: One of the reasons Israel was attacked by Hamas was that Biden gave “$6 billion in ransom money” to Iran.

The role that a recent U.S.-Iran hostage agreement may have played in the Oct. 7 attack in Israel is in dispute. But experts say that Biden’s critics, and his administration in its own defense, make legitimate points.

In August, the U.S. announced an agreement with Iran to secure freedom for five U.S. citizens who’d been detained in the country. In exchange, the U.S. allowed Iran to access $6 billion of its own funds that had been frozen in South Korean banks since 2019. The money consisted of Iranian oil revenues.

Biden administration officials said in multiple TV appearances that the deal could not have hastened or aided the Oct. 7 attack because the money hasn’t been dispersed to Iran yet. Also, they said, the agreement required that Iran only use the funds for humanitarian items, such as medicine and food. But Biden’s critics counter that money is fungible, meaning that the money could be diverted to fund terrorism or simply free up money elsewhere in the Iranian government’s budget to be spent for non-humanitarian needs. 

“If you had a large end-of-year bonus payment coming your way, might you start spending more money in the meantime? Of course. Money is fungible,” said Matthew Kroenig, a Georgetown University professor of government and foreign service.

Still, experts added that whatever support Iran might be providing Hamas would almost certainly have occurred with or without the hostage deal.

Despite having some reservations about the merits of the hostage agreement, “I don’t see any tangible connection between the $6 billion and this Hamas war,” said Matthew Levitt, a senior fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, a think tank that focuses on the Middle East. 

“Iran was already spending significant funds on Hamas and Hezbollah (another Iranian-backed terrorist group based in Lebanon) before this deal,” Levitt said. For years, Iran’s government has “prioritized supporting militant and terrorist proxies over providing services for its own people,” he said.

Claim: “We did 561 miles of wall and we had another 200 that we ordered.” 

Trump overcounted the number of miles of border barriers built under his administration and undercounted the additional miles he secured funding for but didn’t build. 

A U.S. Customs and Border Protection report says Trump built barriers along 458 miles, not 561. In the majority of those miles, smaller and dilapidated barriers were replaced and did not add to the total miles of barriers along the southern border.

Brand new border wall covered 52 miles, by comparison. 

Experts and observers, however, have said that Trump’s work replacing barriers shouldn’t be discounted. In many cases the new 30-foot steel barriers meant to stop pedestrians replaced 4-foot barriers intended to stop vehicles, the libertarian Cato Institute’s David Bier wrote in a 2022 report.

According to CBP figures, the Trump administration secured funding for an additional 280 miles of border barriers that it did not build.

Claim “Under my administration, we reduced drug overdose deaths in New Hampshire by 19% …  under Biden they are up over 15%”

We found some similar numbers, but this lacks context.

Statistics from the New Hampshire medical examiner show that there were 490 drug deaths in 2017, Trump’s first year in office and 417 in 2020 — approximately a 15% decrease. 

The number of drug deaths rose to 463 in 2022, an 11% rise from 2020.

New Hampshire had a Republican governor since January 2017 and a Republican legislature for much of that time.

Dr. Andrew Kolodny of Brandeis University, an opioid policy expert, said the vast majority of the opioid deaths occur in people who were addicted many years before they died.

“I don’t believe Trump deserves any credit for the slight dip during a portion of his administration,” Kolodny said.

Fentanyl has been flowing into the U.S. steadily since late in the Obama administration, Kolodny said, so it is inaccurate to characterize fentanyl as a Biden administration problem. Kolodny criticized all three administrations — Obama, Trump and Biden — for failing to devise a long-term funding stream to make it easier for people to get drug treatment. 

Congressional funding has come in one- to two-year appropriations, which Kolodny said is not sufficient for states to build out treatment systems to expand access. 

We found that nationally the drug overdose death rate dropped in 2018 but went up during three of Trump’s four years in office. 

Chris Stawasz, spokesperson for AMR, the emergency medical services provider for Nashua and Manchester, has been tracking overdoses since 2016. He said he doesn’t know of a clear explanation for the overdose fall during Trump’s tenure. “That’s the million dollar question,” he said.

Claim: “Under my leadership, we had no inflation.”

This needs context. Inflation was lower under Trump than it has been under Biden. Until the COVID-19 pandemic hit, inflation hovered around 2%, just as it had for much of Obama’s presidency. In recent years, the Federal Reserve, the chief federal entity charged with keeping prices stable, has considered 2% its target for inflation. That goal was largely met under Trump. 

Nevertheless, inflation never hit zero during his presidency. It neared that in April 2020 and May 2020, but that was when the pandemic started and the economy was in free-fall.

Under Biden, the inflation rate hit a 40-year high in summer 2022 at 9.1%, but has since slid to 3.7%. 

Economists say that Biden’s American Rescue Plan, the coronavirus and economic relief bill passed early in his tenure, may have exacerbated inflation but did not create it.

Claim: The United States was “energy independent three years ago.”

Data shows that the U.S. has made gains in U.S. energy independence in recent years, but it still has a way to go to reach full energy independence. By three measures — net energy exports, net petroleum exports and greater domestic production than domestic consumption — the U.S. achieved a degree of energy independence during the Trump years. 

Although the U.S. produces enough crude oil to satisfy its consumption, the U.S. cannot refine all of the crude oil it produces, experts say. 

Many U.S. refineries cannot process the type of oil produced here, called “light” and “sweet.” U.S. refineries are built to process heavier, less sweet crude (also called heavy, sour crude) from the Middle East and other overseas suppliers. That’s a holdover from past decades, when the U.S. was primarily importing its crude.

This mismatch keeps the U.S. from simply using its own crude production to serve domestic needs. And by continuing to rely on crude oil imports, the U.S. is far from “independent” of developments overseas. For example, in April 2020, Trump was in high-stakes negotiations with Russian President Vladimir Putin and Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman over oil production.

Claim: New Hampshire pays “the highest energy costs, anywhere in the country.”

Hawaii has the highest energy costs, but New Hampshire came in second, according to a report released earlier this year by SunPower, a solar company.

“Although the cost of residential electricity is approximately 13 cents per kilowatt-hour cheaper than in Hawaii, the New Hampshire average of 32.32 cents per kilowatt-hour is higher than all other states, exceeding the U.S. average by over 190%,” the report said.

SunPower examined the total average cost of residential electricity in cents per kilowatt-hour as of September 2022 from the U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA) Electric Power Monthly.

Trump promised to bring down energy costs in New Hampshire and said he will “rescind every Green New Deal catastrophe of the Biden administration.” The Green New Deal was a resolution, which is nonbinding and not actual legislation, and was voted down in the Senate in 2019. It was reintroduced in the House in April but is not expected to pass. 

Claim: “Bacon has gone up five times … in the last year and a half.”

This is False. 

At its peak under Biden, the price of bacon rose by 30%, not the 400% that it would be if Trump’s “five times” comment was correct.

After a subsequent decline in price, the increase during Biden’s presidency now stands at 11.5%. Today’s level is just 2% higher than its peak under Trump.

David L. Ortega, Michigan State University associate professor in the Department of Agricultural, Food and Resource Economics, told PolitiFact that “fluctuations in bacon or pork prices in general have nothing to do with who is president.”

Claim: “The Trump administration gave you .. the biggest tax cuts … in the history of our country.”

This is False. 

In inflation-adjusted dollars, the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017 is the fourth-largest since 1940. And as a percentage of GDP, it ranks seventh.

Claim: “When I left office, we had (the gasoline price) all the way down to $1.99 a gallon.”

Gas prices dipped below $2 during the Trump administration — during the pandemic. National average gasoline prices fell to $1.79 in May 2020, when much economic activity, commuting and travel stopped. 

When Trump left office — as the pandemic was easing — average gasoline prices were higher, $2.38. And over the course of his presidency, the price averaged $2.46.

Experts say key reasons gasoline prices have been higher under Biden are the return to economic normalcy, which increased demand, and the war in Ukraine, which led Western nations to limit their purchases of Russian oil, constraining supply, at least temporarily.

PolitiFact Reporter Samantha Putterman contributed to this report.

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“There is no climate emergency,” posts proclaimed on X, formerly Twitter, sharing a message allegedly supported by more than a thousand scientists.

Some X users circulated a “world climate declaration” that they claimed proves the climate crisis is a “hoax” and is “based on politics, not on science.” 

“1,609 scientists, including two Nobel laureates, gathered together to sign a declaration, proclaiming that ‘there is no climate emergency,’” a Sept. 15 X post said.

The claim misleads by overlooking a few details.

First, there is wide consensus among climate scientists, scientific associations and institutions that climate change is real and is caused primarily by humans burning fossil fuels. Nearly 200 scientific organizations around the world assert that climate change is caused by human action.

Second, the statement about this document being signed by 1,609 scientists glosses over key information about both the document and its signatories. The document was published by Climate Intelligence or Clintel, a group founded by science journalist Marcel Crok and geophysics professor Guus Berkhout, who began his career with oil giant Shell in 1964. 

Clintel’s website says the group aims to “generate knowledge and understanding” of the causes and effects of climate change and climate policy. It makes its stance clear: “The climate view of CLINTEL can be easily summarized as: There is no climate emergency.”

A scan of the 1,609 signatures shows that not all were scientists. Several were from other professions; some listed no science background at all.

In September 2022, Agence France-Presse analyzed a previous version of this document published in 2020, which then had 1,200 signatories. Many signatories were scientists of various kinds, including 40 geophysicists and 130 geologists. Only 10 of the signatories described themselves as climatologists or climate scientists, Agence France-Presse found.

About 200 signatories were engineers. Other professionals were mathematicians, medical doctors and agricultural scientists. Six signatories were deceased.

The updated version with 1,609 signatories, published Aug. 14, marked 12 people as deceased. Among the scientists, specialties included geology, chemistry, physics and agriculture. Those with climate expertise were few.

The list included engineers, doctors, lawyers, mathematicians, architects, entrepreneurs, and economists. Others did not list any occupation at all. Some descriptions read:

• “Sceptical (sic) Scientific Contrarian in the Climate Debate”

• “Leadership development and coaching”

• “Physicist and YouTuber”

• “Sculptor, designer and innovator”

The two Nobel laureates who signed the declaration — John F. Clauser (the 2022 winner for physics) and Ivar Giaever (who shared the 1973 prize for physics — have a history of denying the climate crisis.

The declaration — a version of which was published as early as 2019 —  made six claims, including that carbon dioxide is not a pollutant. Others downplay the threat, severity and impact of climate change such as, “warming is far slower than predicted,” and “global warming has not increased natural disasters.” This list of claims has been assessed as having “very low” credibility by scientists, as reported in a review published by Climate Feedback, a global network of scientists that debunks inaccurate climate change claims. The reviewers said the statement gave cherry-picked information about carbon dioxide and climate change impact and presented them in a “biased and misleading way.”

The statement that “1,609 scientists signed a declaration saying ‘there is no climate emergency’” contains an element of truth but ignores critical facts that would give a different impression. We rate it Mostly False.

PolitiFact researcher Caryn Baird contributed to this report.

A Facebook post sharing a video that’s drawing thousands of views purports to show footage of recent violence between Hamas and Israel. 

“Israel and Palestine,” the Oct. 8 Facebook post caption says. “War with the help of helicopter.”

The clip shows helicopters being shot down from the sky. Some Facebook users were immediately suspicious. 

“Nice video game,” one person commented.

“Not a video game,” the account that posted the video replied.

But look closely at the bottom of the video and see three words that give it away: “Belal the Gamer.”

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 already doesn’t look like realistic footage of a war. But it appears this particular clip was poached from another user’s account. Belal the Gamer posts clips from the video game Arma 3, a military simulation. 

We rate claims that this is authentic footage of recent violence between Israel and Hamas False.