When Vice President Kamala Harris was the attorney general of California in 2014, she announced a program to help young people transitioning out of the criminal justice system. She glibly referred to the 18-24 age group as “stupid,” saying people that age “make really bad decisions.” But social media posts have taken her words out of context.
We fact-checked former President Donald Trump’s speech accepting his party’s nomination.
Viral online posts make the unfounded claim that a woman at former President Donald Trump’s July 13 rally acted “suspicious,” suggesting that she might have been involved in a plot to assassinate Trump, and that a QAnon-related character may have also been involved. The FBI has said that the “investigation to date indicates the shooter acted alone.”
Former President Donald Trump’s newly selected running mate, JD Vance, accepted the Republican Party’s vice presidential nomination on the convention’s third night, which featured claims about the economy, immigration and foreign policy.
Posts from the anonymous online forum 4Chan have been spreading the false claim that Secret Service officials prevented an agent named “Jonathan Willis” from shooting former President Donald Trump’s attempted assassin. The Secret Service has no employee by that name, and the claim is “categorically false,” the agency said.
In the first debate clash of the 2024 campaign, the two candidates unleashed a flurry of false and misleading statements.
A federal appeals court has revived a lawsuit against the Los Angeles Unified School District for its now-rescinded COVID-19 vaccine requirement. The court said the case should be allowed to develop beyond the preliminary arguments. But anti-vaccination activists have twisted the opinion to falsely claim the court had “declared that the mRNA covid jab is NOT a vaccine.”
A photo taken in January shows a large tunnel under Gaza’s northern border with Israel, reportedly used in the Oct. 7 attack by Hamas. But recent social media posts falsely claim that the photo shows a tunnel connecting Egypt with the southern Gaza city of Rafah — where Palestinians displaced by the Israel-Hamas war have been sheltering.
Social media posts seeking to discredit the judge who presided over former President Donald Trump’s criminal case in New York have been circulating online. Contrary to a popular meme, the judge’s wife works for a Republican district attorney, not the Democratic state attorney general, and his daughter was not personally paid by a high-profile Democrat.
A Michigan town clerk pleaded no contest in 2023 to a charge of misconduct in office. Social media posts misleadingly highlight her case to push the false narrative that the 2020 presidential election was “rigged.” The clerk’s case was related to her local primary race, not the presidential election.