Celebrity Endorsement

Did Neil Diamond, Eminem, Coco Gauff or any of a long list of celebrities donate $5 million to provide emergency relief and medical aid following the tragic elementary school strike in southern Iran? No, that's not true: The false claim that at least 20 sports, entertainment and political celebs made such contributions was created and distributed by a spam factory…

Did Rachel Maddow, Stephen Colbert and Jimmy Kimmel just team up and launch a newsroom named "The Independent Desk"? No, that's not true: The story appeared on a recently launched website that does not list owners or publishers and it just adds Jimmy Kimmel to an older false story about Maddow and Colbert. The new story also contains verifiably untrue…

Did country music legend George Strait reject a $500 million deal from Elon Musk to endorse Tesla? No, that's not true: This is a fake story designed to get people to click on a link to a website. This identical fake story, with the same fake quote, keeps getting recycled with different celebrity names attached. The fake story appeared in…

Did Elon Musk post a promo code to his crypto project on X, and was that post then used to make a Times Square billboard promotion in New York City? No, that's not true: This is a fabricated image promoting a crypto currency scam. There is no evidence that Musk made this post or that the crypto promotion ever appeared…

Did Travis Kelce announce his support for Kamala Harris' presidential candidacy in late September 2024 after his girlfriend Taylor Swift did the same? No, that's not true: This claim first appeared on a website that says it "specializes in satire, parody, and humor" and that "nothing on this website is real." No actual news websites have reported that Kelce made…

Did a police department report that an autistic teen named "Ivan Moore" is missing? No, that's not true: The teen shown in social-media images captioned with this name is not urgently sought by any police department. This attention-grabbing narrative is a classic trick to get people to share the missing-child post, which will later be edited to become a scam…

Did Team USA lose $60 million in endorsements after Caitlin Clark was not placed on the 2024 USA Basketball Women's Olympic Team? No, that's not true: the Indiana Fever WNBA player is indeed not on the team but the United States Olympic & Paralympic Committee told Lead Stories that the claim about losing endorsements is "not true." A representative of…

Did a video on Facebook genuinely show TV personality Tucker Carlson endorsing an anti-parasite pill promoted by alternative naturopath Barbara O'Neill? No, that's not true: The video is dubbed with fake audio; an AI detection tool found it was 70.6 percent likely it was created using AI. Lead Stories traced the original clip of Carlson: He was discussing the Foreign…

Did Barbara O'Neill guarantee that a hypertension medication will clear your vessels and cure the disease in three weeks or she will transfer $10,000 into your bank account -- and have Samuel Jackson, Jane Seymour and Tom Hanks all endorsed this treatment after it cured their hypertension? No, neither statement is true: This false promotion uses AI-generated voice-overs to put…

Does a video show Dr. Oz being attacked on TV for promoting a supposed three-day diabetes cure? No, that's not true: The footage that purports to be of Dr. Mehmet Oz being beaten up on a TV set stage was a live broadcast of a Ukrainian journalist brawling with a pro-Russian politician. The image of Oz with an apparent black…