&Quot;Stephen Colbert&Quot;

False claims about the Charlie Kirk assassination, the Jeffrey Epstein files, and purported verbal gaffes by President Trump topped the list of most-read Lead Stories fact checks in 2025. Here are our most read fact checks of the past year, reflecting our reader's interest in finding out the truth about various viral stories. If you see something suspicious in 2026,…

Did Barbra Streisand just announce a massive donation while accepting a "Lifetime Achievement Award" at a Los Angeles gala in front of various tech titans, billionaires and powerful people? No, that's not true: The exact same story, often accompanied by an image or a mention of Mark Zuckerberg, has been posted about dozens of celebrities by a network of sites…

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 Karoline Leavitt or someone else tweet "You Need To Shut Up" at various celebrities and did they all react during a "live show" with millions of viewers? No, that's not true: Dozens of variations of the same story but mentioning different celebrities were posted by a network of Facebook pages and websites operated from Vietnam. Leavitt's personal and official…

Were President Donald Trump, former President Barack Obama or TV host Jimmy Kimmel silenced after calling Harvard grads "overrated and dumb" when opponents revealed their SAT scores? No, that's not true: There is no public record of Trump, Obama or Kimmel saying it. There is also no record of anyone confronting those men with their SAT scores. Facebook pages administered…

Did Zohran Mamdani, Melania Trump, Sen. John Kennedy or other prominent Americans go live with a 3 a.m. emergency monologue claiming they were under threat for secrets they were about to expose about President Donald Trump or former presidents Barack Obama and Joe Biden? No, that's not true: Nearly identical stories mentioning those and other names were published by a…

Did prominent Americans like Elon Musk, Caitlin Clark, Stephen Colbert, and Joy Behar each pay down $667,000 of schoolkids' lunchroom debts? No, there's no evidence that's true: In the case of FBI Director Kash Patel, the gift was inflated to $979,000, which would be more than five times his FBI salary.The posts making the claims include no evidence by which…

Was former first lady Michelle Obama videotaped executing a barbed takedown of Donald Trump on the 'Jimmy Kimmel Live!' show in the fall of 2025? No, that's not true: As of November 12, 2025, no such video recording existed. Michelle Obama hadn't been on Kimmel's show for years at that time. The claim appeared in a post (archived here) published…

This is what fact checkers call a "prebunk." A prebunk is like a debunk (another word for fact check), only it's an advance notice of an anticipated false claim. This article is intended to inoculate you from future outbreaks of a specific type of false claims about your favorite entertainment celebrities, sports stars, and politicians. We call this "Viet Spam"…

Did singer Bob Dylan just "ignite a firestorm" with a single sentence about Charlie Kirk and was that sentence "If you want people to speak kindly after you're gone, speak kindly while you're alive"? No, that's not true: Dylan is just the latest victim in a series of Facebook posts falsely attributing the same quote to various celebrities. According to…