&Quot;Free Speech&Quot;

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.…

Did Elon Musk permanently ban author Stephen King from X after King called Musk "the First Lady"? No, that's not true: King posted on his own X account that neither the "first lady" reference nor the ban happened. King added "Yet here I am." A Google News search did not find any news articles about Musk banning King's account. The…

Did the messaging service Telegram announce that Apple might be deleting the Telegram app from devices in August 2024? No, that's not true: No such announcement has ever been made by Telegram. A false social media hoax from 2021 resurfaced after Telegram's CEO, Pavel Durov, was arrested in France on August 24, 2024. It was debunked in 2021, and it's…

Did the Academy of Country Music place a lifetime ban on entertainer Jack Black after his bandmate made comments about the assassination attempt against former President Donald Trump? No, that's not true: The false report was posted on a self-proclaimed "fake news" website. There also is no evidence that the Academy of Country Music proclaimed that Black was banned. The…

Does a viral video show actor Harrison Ford advocating for Palestine? No, that's not true: A fragment of his speech was taken out of context. Ford was discussing the Amazon rainforest at a 2019 United Nations climate event, over four years before the Hamas-Israel war that began on October 7, 2023. The claim appeared in a post (archived here) on…

Did Germany pass a law that includes fines of up to 10,000 euros for using a wrong pronoun while referring to a transgender person? No, that's not true: The law specifically says that what is punishable is a malicious disclosure of that person's birth gender or of their deadname (the name they used prior to transition) without their consent. It…