In June 2019, social media posts popped up claiming that that it costs taxpayers $750 (or $775) per child per day to house immigrant children in “tent cities” and other detention facilities. A June 22 2019 post on the Facebook page “Your Privilege Is Showing” was shared nearly 10,000 times, and it featured a screenshot …
Does It Cost $750 a Day to House Migrant Children in Camps? Read More »
In June 2018, a Facebook user shared a post (archived here) featuring a screenshot of a tweet about rosary beads purportedly confiscated from migrants taken into custody by border agents. That post was shared more than 89,000 times in a year. The tweet was originally published on the same date, and it accrued more than 209,000 shares …
Does a Photograph Show Rosaries Confiscated from Border Detainees? Read More »
In late June 2019, United States President Donald Trump repeatedly claimed that his administration did not have a family separation policy at the border — going further to attribute the controversial actions to his predecessor, Barack Obama. Trump outright stated this lie multiple times in a series of interviews between June 21 and June 23, 2019: On …
Did U.S. President Barack Obama Have a Separation Policy at the Border? Read More »
On June 23 2019, the Facebook page “Just Disney” shared a meme which claimed that the late Don Rickles’ Mr. Potato Head character appeared in the feature film Toy Story 4 — despite his death in April 2017: Beneath a still from the animated films, the text read: Don Rickles intended to reprise his role as Mr. …
Was Don Rickles Included in ‘Toy Story 4’ Thanks to Archival Material? Read More »
As tensions between the United States and Iran escalated in June 2019, a number of memes circulated that purportedly depicted tweets sent by Donald Trump between 2011 and 2013 — predicting that former United States President Barack Obama would fabricate a reason to attack Iran to divert attention from his administration. At least two versions …
Despite fears of “deepfake” videos and other high-tech ways disinformation could potentially proliferate in the very near future, the stories that still get the most traction are often decidedly low effort. Take, for example, the case of a May 2019 story with the provocative headline “Panel of 16 Judges Agrees: Barr Has Enough to Indict Clinton …
Have Arrest Warrants Been Issued for Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama? Read More »
On June 16 2019, the Facebook page “Weird Facts” shared the following meme (archived here), about a cook and a janitor who purportedly refused to abandon the residents of a bankrupted care home: Atop an image of two unidentified men, the meme read: A Californian care home went bankrupt. About 16 elderly residents were abandoned, …
A headline about former First Daughter Malia Obama (archived here) depositing a suspiciously large check got a lot of traction on social media in June 2019: However, this story is suspect for two reasons. First, it contains little beyond a provocative headline, a photograph, and a few lines of text: Malia Obama cashed a check for …
On June 18 2019, Twitter user @johncatsjr shared the following tweet (“why I’m voting for Donald Trump in 2020”), a missive picked up by innumerable other users — along with an original misspelling: In that first version, the user spelled “manufacturing” as “manufactuing,” an error present in reposts of the same cut-and-pasted content: In the …
‘Why I’m Voting for Donald Trump in 2020’ Twitter Meme Read More »
If you use Facebook, chances are you’ve stumbled upon the videos of Jay Shetty — perhaps the one that is very vaguely titled “Before You Judge Anyone, Watch This,” which is a parable about airport cookie theft: The same story was told in another video on Twitter in 2017: In the video, Shetty narrates a …
