Nikki Haley said China bought 400,000 acres of U.S. farmland “near our military installations.” Chinese investors own a total of 383,935 acres, or about 1% of foreign-held agricultural land in the U.S. It’s not the amount near U.S. military installations.
Lady Gaga campaigned for Joe Biden during the 2020 election and performed at his inauguration. But viral social media posts use an altered photo to falsely make it appear she has endorsed Donald Trump for president in 2024. The performer, who has been highly critical of Trump, has not made a public endorsement in the 2024 race.
Hunter Biden, who has no prior criminal history, has reached a plea deal that would avoid jail time for a gun-related charge. Some conservative commentators claim the president’s son is getting special treatment, misleadingly equating his case with one involving a rapper who had a criminal record before getting a 46-month sentence for two gun-related charges.
President Joe Biden has been giving a series of campaign-style speeches, touting the success of his economic policies, which he calls “Bidenomics,” and talking about his efforts to diversify the federal courts. But we found that some of his claims were wrong or imprecise.
FTX co-founder Sam Bankman-Fried was arrested in 2022 for allegedly defrauding customers by stealing billions of dollars for personal use, including nearly $38 million in political donations to Democrats. Online posts falsely claim the Biden administration has dropped all charges against Bankman-Fried. But he is under house arrest and awaiting trial.
It remains unknown how the virus that causes COVID-19 originated, but many scientists think a natural spillover is most likely. Online posts have cited unnamed sources to claim that scientists in Wuhan, China, were the first to get sick with COVID-19. But U.S. intelligence says the researchers’ symptoms were non-specific or inconsistent with COVID-19, and the information has no bearing on the origin of the pandemic.
In June 24 remarks, former President Donald Trump made misleading claims about the reach of the National Archives and Records Administration and the federal charges he is facing for allegedly retaining classified documents after he was no longer in office. Trump also made an unsubstantiated claim about President Joe Biden.
A Harvard University professor warned in 2018 that steps were needed over the next five years to reduce carbon pollution to preserve Arctic ice. Climate activist Greta Thunberg then shared a tweet that misquoted the professor. But recent social media posts have distorted Thunberg’s tweet to falsely claim she predicted human extinction by 2023.
In a meeting with the Indian prime minister and CEOs of technology companies, President Joe Biden joked about Republican investigations into him and his family. “I sold a lot of state secrets and a lot of very important things,” he joked, and added, “Now, all kidding aside.” But a viral video has been misleadingly edited to omit Biden saying that he was joking.
Breast cancer in younger women has been increasing gradually in recent decades. But a social media post misrepresents case number projections for 2022 and 2023 to falsely claim they show a dramatic rise in early-onset breast cancer — and then baselessly ties its faulty comparisons to COVID-19 vaccines.