Israel

Was a bearded Jeffrey Epstein photographed walking in Tel Aviv, Israel in 2026? No, that's not true: Jeffrey Epstein died in 2019. The image is AI-generated. Some versions of the image circulating on social media have been cropped, but the full-size image shows the Gemini AI Sparkle watermark in the lower right corner. Two cropped versions of the fake image…

Did President Ronald Reagan and First Lady Nancy Reagan quietly drive themselves to a Virginia nursing home to serve breakfast to elderly residents on Christmas Day 1983? No, that's not true: This is a completely made-up story that is contradicted by historical records, including President Reagan's personal diary entry for that date. It was published by a Pakistani-based spam factory…

Does a video show real footage of a U.K. member of Parliament asking why Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has not been captured the same way the United States captured Nicolás Maduro in Venezuela? No, that's not true: The clip was generated using artificial intelligence. Early versions of the video included a watermark indicating a specific generative AI tool. There…

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,…

Does a viral video show missiles raining down from the clouds on Caracas, Venezuela on January 3, 2026? No, that's not true: A viral video making the rounds does not show the actual attacks that took place on that date. It is an old video from 2025 that was described at the time as missiles from Iran impacting Tel Aviv.…

Does an image shared by President Trump in a Truth Social post that reads "Eagles going down!" show an American eagle killed by a wind turbine? No, that's not true: The photograph used to illustrate Trump's post is of a European red kite killed by a wind turbine in Spain at least 15 years earlier. This was the second time…

Are windmills -- also known as wind turbines -- killing all of the bald eagles in the United States, as President Donald Trump claimed in a Truth Social post? No, that's not true: Studies estimate the number of eagles killed by wind turbines in the contiguous 48 U.S. states was in the hundreds in 2024, including both bald and golden…

Does a viral clip show real "transgender Providence Police Department spokesperson Lyle Culpepper" demanding that the public stop saying "the Brown shooter"? No, that's not true: The person in the video is comedian L.E. Staiman. In interviews, Staiman has said that he believes his videos are so absurd that people can easily understand they are parody and satire. The claim…

Does a viral image really show the "leaked Facebook profile" of the "Bondi Beach shooter" and does it reveal he is an Israeli named "David Cohen"? No, that's not true: The image circulating on social media shows several signs of digital tampering and possible use of AI. Authorities have named "Naveed Akram" and "Sajid Akram" as the shooters in the…

Does a viral picture of what looks like an Israeli passport confirm that Volodymyr Zelenskyy became an Israeli citizen before he became president of Ukraine? No, that's not true: The image got the spelling of his last name wrong. The machine-readable text on the bottom of the first page didn't fit the internationally standardized form, either. The claim appeared in…