Isolated

Does footage of the Ingenuity Mars Helicopter's first flight actually show the desert landscape of Algeria and not Mars in the background? No, that's not true: Footage of the takeoff and landing of NASA's Ingenuity Mars Helicopter, posted on YouTube by NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, does not show the same scenery as pictured in an Instagram post. The real footage…

Does a video show Mongols and Hells Angels members heading to Colorado in 2024 to "deal with" Venezuelan gang members? No, that's not true: The original video is at least 14 years old. The video was previously used in 2020 to claim Hells Angels and Mongols members were heading to Seattle to confront antifa followers, and was fact checked by…

Does a video on Instagram Threads show Hells Angels and other motorcycle clubs going to Aurora, Colorado, to fight a Venezuelan gang after violence was reported in August 2024? No, that's not true: The video was first posted to TikTok in November 2022 -- nearly two years before media reported gang violence in Aurora. The video's original poster clarified on…

Does a video on Instagram show Hells Angels going to Aurora, Colorado, to fight members of a Venezuelan gang after gang-related violence was reported in August 2024? No, that's not true: The video was first posted to TikTok on July 7, 2024, more than a month before local media reported gang violence in Aurora. Elements in the video and on…

Do images shared on Facebook genuinely show what appears to be a UFO in the "remote desert of Egypt"? No, that's not true: Hive Moderation, an online tool used to detect AI-generated images, confirmed that it was 99.6 percent likely the images were created using AI. They were first published to a Reddit thread about content generated using the AI…

Is it statistically impossible that Joe Biden added 600,000 votes in Pennsylvania overnight during the 2020 election count? No, that's not true: The Pennsylvania Department of State told Lead Stories that "This claim is misinformation." Both 2020 presidential candidates, Biden and then-President Donald Trump, added hundreds of thousands of votes in the overnight hours following the closure of polls on…

Did the CIA declassify a 1957 file in 1999 that proves true the theories about the hidden history of an advanced global civilization, the Tartarian Empire? No, that's not true: The CIA document "National Cultural Development Under Communism" contains mention of "Tatars of Transcaucasia" and "the history of Tartaria," along with a Communist directive to revise that history to "eliminate…

Did Egyptians deliver humanitarian aid of food and water carried on their backs from Egypt to Gaza? No, that's not true: The video in the post making that claim predates the 2023 Hamas-Israel conflict and therefore could not depict a humanitarian response to the October, 2023 blockade imposed by Israel. The video used in the false claim was first posted…

Does this video show images of flooding in Berlin "right now"? No, that's not true: Lead Stories was able to identify most of these scenes and none show flooding in Berlin. While several clips showing flooding from the summer of 2023, much of the footage is from the 2021 European flash floods in Rhineland-Palatinate and North Rhine-Westphalia in Germany as…

Are 78,000 people "under the water" right now in Great Britain? No, that's not true: This video is a compilation of flood and storm video clips from years past, and in some cases from other places such as Canada and South Africa. These are not scenes of a flood happening in Great Britain on August 26, 2023, when the clam…