The year is almost over, so it is good to look back. First, the numbers, as of December 15, 2022. This year we have published 1,555 fact checks in English (so far ...) 283 fact checks about COVID misinformation; 244 debunks of Russian propaganda and false claims about the invasion of Ukraine; 140 debunks of false claims about election fraud,…
Did Hillary Clinton, the former U.S. secretary of state and 2016 Democratic presidential nominee, tweet about "Elon Musk's suicide" in response to the Twitter CEO releasing corporate discussions, now known as "The Twitter Files," about Twitter's removal of content or blocking accounts? No, that's not true: Lead Stories could not find the tweet on Clinton's verified Twitter account or its…
Did Elon Musk tweet that Democrats paid former Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey millions of dollars to block or delete the pages of people who posted about Hunter Biden's laptop during the 2020 election? No, that's not true: Lead Stories could find no evidence that Musk wrote the tweet nor any credible news reporting on its claims. The claim appeared in…
Did Arizona Secretary of State Katie Hobbs' office contact Twitter to have posts removed to censor political opponents? No, that's not true: Hobbs' office asked the Center for Internet Security in 2021 to alert Twitter about an account that was making false claims about the state's voter information database. The tweets that were flagged had nothing to do with the…
Did the staff of presidential candidate Joe Biden and the Democratic National Committee suppress political speech leading up to the 2020 election against then-President Donald Trump when it requested certain tweets be reviewed? No, that's not true: all of the deleted tweets we were able to review apparently violated Twitter's Terms of Service -- in particular, the rule that forbids…
Does a video posted on Facebook show Sen. John Kennedy releasing classified documents in the Senate or declaring that an interlocutor had "a deal" with President Joe Biden's son, Hunter Biden? No, that's not true: The video shows Kennedy questioning FBI Director Christopher Wray about a former FBI agent who was involved in investigations into Hunter Biden. Sen. Tom Cotton…
Did Rep. Jim Jordan play a video downloaded from Hunter Biden's laptop that incriminated House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff? No, that's not true: The video with this claim shows Jordan criticizing Schiff over matters that have nothing to do with Hunter Biden or the contents of a computer hard drive that media reports have linked to him. The claim…
Does a video show Sen. John Kennedy "exposing" Hunter Biden, son of President Joe Biden, in Congress? No, that's not true: The video in a post making the claim shows an unrelated clip of Kennedy questioning voting rights activist Stacey Abrams of Georgia in a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing. The post has a clickbait headline apparently to draw attention to…
Did Sen. Ted Cruz say he has Hunter Biden's laptop and leak a secret document implicating U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland? No, that's not true: This video does not include any of those claims. The video is an exchange between Cruz and Franita Tolson, the George T. and Harriet E. Pfleger Chair in Law at the University of Southern California…
Did the Supreme Court finally sign a verdict to impeach Speaker Pelosi? No, that's not true: The clickbait headline for a video that shows multiple republican lawmakers speaking but makes no mention of an impeachment of Pelosi and offers no evidence that it happened. The Supreme Court does not have the power to impeach a legislator, only the U.S. House…
Lead Stories is a U.S. based fact checking website that is always looking for the latest false, misleading, deceptive or
inaccurate stories, videos or images going viral on the internet.
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