Did ABC News tweet that Harvard tuition for the 2025-2026 school year will be free for "students from Jewish families" with annual incomes of $200,000 or less, as a social media post claims? No, that's not true: The genuine ABC News tweet was altered to produce the counterfeit version used in a post on X. There is no such story on ABC News' website or its X account, nor did a search of Google News' index of thousands of news outlets show any sign of such a report, which would have in itself been newsworthy.
The supposed ABC post appeared in a March 17, 2025 X.com post (archived here) published by published by "1984" an X account devoted to criticism of Jews, under the title "BREAKING". It opened:
Harvard announces that tuition for the 25-26 academic school year will be free for students from jewish families with annual incomes of $200k or less.
THIS IS WHAT I VOTED FOR!
This is what the post looked like at the time of publication:
(Source: X.com screenshot taken Wed Mar 19 at 23:02:28 UTC 2025)
The fake X post was a doctored version of ABC News' actual tweet about Harvard's tuition policy, which made no mention of Jewish families, as the screenshot below shows:
(Source: X.com screenshot taken Thu Mar 20 at 00:34:44 UTC 2025)
Lead Stories confirmed that this was the only ABC News report on the Harvard announcement by manually searching ABC News' X account, finding only two posts, neither of which included language about Jewish families.
Lead Stories corroborated that finding by searching the ABC News website, finding only its reports on Harvard's tuition policy announcement on March 17, 2025, none of which singled out Jewish families.
Similarly, a search (using the terms Harvard AND tuition AND Jewish) of Google News' index of thousands of reputable news outlets (archived here), turned up no evidence ABC News ever published a report declaring Harvard eliminated tuition for students from Jewish families earning under $200,000 per year.
Fact checks of other claims made by the "1984" and "George Orwell 1984" accounts can be found here.
