&Quot;Free Speech&Quot;

Did Cher tell Karoline Leavitt to "sit down, baby girl" after reading out her bio on MSNBC? No, that's not true: The viral story about the singer reacting to a supposed rant from Leavitt about "out-of-touch celebrities who think they can lecture America" originated on a network of websites and Facebook pages run from Vietnam. It contained verifiably false details.…

Did MSNBC air old 2017 footage of a large crowd in Boston Common and misrepresent it as live footage of the Oct.2025 No Kings protest? No, that's not true: The footage shows the October 18, 2025 No Kings protest as it was taking place. The 2017 protest mentioned on social media took place in a different area of the Boston…

Did singer Pink publish a defense of Jimmy Kimmel on social media that read "Freedom of speech cannot be bought with money; it is the voice of the people."? No, that's not true: No such post appeared on any of the social media channels of the singer. The story was promoted by a Facebook page managed from abroad. The claim…

Did Charlie Kirk make this final video sometime before he died, "Knowing this day might come"? No, that's not true: A video posted on TikTok contains a mashup of real scenes, but the audio is fake. A specialized detection tool analyzed the audio track from this video and determined that the voice of Charlie Kirk was made with an AI…

Was Steven Kenneth Bonnell II, also known as streamer Destiny, permanently removed from Twitch in the aftermath of his September 2025 comments on Charlie Kirk's assassination? No, that's not true: The real, indefinite ban still affecting streamer Destiny was already in effect before the killing of the conservative activist. It has been in effect since March 24, 2022. The claim…

On June 3, 2025 I was invited to make a statement during a public hearing at the European Parliament in Brussels, Belgium organized by the Special Committee on the European Democracy Shield. The hearing was titled "Enforcement of the EU Digital Rulebook and political advertising in the context of foreign interference: understanding Foreign Information Manipulation and Interference (FIMI) and disinformation…

April 2 is International Fact-Checking Day, a global celebration of truth and accuracy. Like every year we want to take the opportunity to say that "Facts Matter". Usually at Lead Stories we are quite content to let the facts speak for themselves, but this year we have a much more eloquent guest speaker, world-famous actor Stephen Fry: Some of our…

Does a genuine transcript show what Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard said after Representative Jim Himes asked a question about retweeting "posts from individuals affiliated with Russian state media" using her personal account? No, that's not true: The fake transcript starts off with things that were actually said but then adds more questions from a "reporter" who wasn't actually…

Lead Stories was surprised and disappointed to first learn through media reports and a press release about the end of the Meta Third-Party Fact-Checking Partnership of which Lead Stories has been a part since 2019. On January 7, 2025, Joel Kaplan, the newly-appointed Chief Global Affairs Officer at Meta, announced in a press release that Meta will be ending the…

Did Elon Musk state that X accounts that called him "fat" or "The First Lady" would be "suspended without warning"? No, that's not true: There is no evidence that Musk ever made such a post. There are still posts calling him those phrases on the platform. The claim appeared in a post (archived here) on Threads on November 20, 2024.…