Making a point about Defense Department waste, Democratic presidential candidate Andrew Yang related a secondhand story about a Navy fighter pilot who said that airmen routinely dumped fuel into the Pacific Ocean at the end of the fiscal year as a way to preserve the following year’s fuel budget. But the story doesn’t add up.
A narrowed field of 10 Democratic candidates debated health care, immigration and gun control, but not all of their claims squared with the facts.
A social media meme inaccurately claims that Walmart will no longer sell rifles. Walmart stopped selling “military-style rifles such as the AR-15,” in 2015, and has announced it will no longer sell ammunition for “military-style weapons.” It still sells “long guns for hunting and sport shooting.”
In making his case for taking swift action on climate change, Democratic presidential candidate Pete Buttigieg inaccurately said that “we could lose half the world’s oxygen because of what’s going on in the oceans.” Scientists say that’s a misreading of the evidence.
A 1978 photo of a Somalian army recruit has been misidentified on social media as Rep. Ilhan Omar, who wasn’t born until 1982.
Ads posted on Facebook from a committee working to reelect President Donald Trump claim that Democrats are calling for the Second Amendment to be repealed. To support the claim, the Trump campaign pointed to statements by a few state lawmakers and one candidate for U.S. Senate.
Viral posts on social media make the baseless claim that the shooter in Odessa, Texas, had a sticker on his car for Democratic presidential candidate Beto O’Rourke. The Texas Department of Public Safety said there was no sticker on the car he was driving during the attack.
Just as CNN was beginning its climate town hall event, President Donald Trump tweeted a list of “8 facts” boasting of the nation’s air quality and carbon emissions reductions. Several of his “facts,” however, are inaccurate or misleading.
President Trump inaccurately stated in his Sept. 1 tweet that Alabama “will most likely be hit” by Hurricane Dorian — a statement that was fact-checked in real time by the National Weather Service. Despite that, Trump has twisted the facts by using an altered forecast map to support his inaccurate tweet.
Viral social media posts wrongly suggest that President Donald Trump’s three eldest children are citizens only because of birthright citizenship.