Conspiracy theories and misinformation on social media began clouding coverage of the July 13 attempted assassination of former President Donald Trump almost immediately after it happened. We addressed several of those claims.
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.”
A chart widely shared on social media comparing macroeconomic indicators purports to show the country fared better under former President Donald Trump than President Joe Biden. However, the chart cites some figures that are inaccurate, outdated or misleading.
FactCheck.org staff writer Catalina Jaramillo spoke with La Red Hispana, a Spanish-language media network, about our efforts to combat misinformation in Spanish.
During his speech at the Republican National Convention, Rep. Tom Emmer of Minnesota talked about “rioters” in Minneapolis after the death of George Floyd in 2020, and misleadingly said that Vice President Kamala Harris “freed” from jail one of “the criminals” who “went on to murder a man” in neighboring St. Paul. Emmer is distorting the facts.
In a leaked phone call with independent presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr., former President Donald Trump incorrectly suggested that childhood vaccine doses are too large and can provoke sudden, radical changes in babies. There’s no evidence that the current vaccination schedule is harmful to kids.
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.
Extensive media coverage of the attempted assassination of former President Donald Trump at a Pennsylvania campaign rally shows his injury and the immediate response of Secret Service agents. But social media posts make the unsupported claims that Trump wasn’t shot and the agents’ response indicates the incident was “staged.”
On a night when the focus was on safety and unity at the Republican convention, a number of GOP leaders also offered up some misleading and false claims we have seen before.