In the video, a large, red banner unfurled from an ornate building in front of a cheering crowd.
The banner read “Supreme Leader Thanks you American boys and girls!” and featured a picture of Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.
The video was shared June 22 on Instagram with a caption that said, “Controversial Banner of Iranian Supreme Leader Displayed at Brooklyn Museum.”
The caption continued, claiming that a pro-Palestinian group displayed “a large banner featuring the image of the Iranian Supreme Leader outside the Brooklyn Museum in New York.”
A man in the video echoed that claim, saying, “Pro-Palestinian protesters take to the Brooklyn Museum and then they drape the leader of Iran — a big banner — over the museum.”
This post was flagged as part of Meta’s efforts to combat false news and misinformation on its News Feed. (Read more about our partnership with Meta, which owns Facebook and Instagram.) We also saw it circulatingon X.
(Screenshot from Instagram.)
Although protesters recently raised banners at the Brooklyn Museum, an art museum with about 1.5 million works of art in its collection, we found no news reports, photos, videos or other evidence that this one was ever hoisted there.
During a May 31 protest, demonstrators displayed the black banner reading, “Free Palestine Divest From Genocide,” from the top of the Brooklyn Museum’s facade. Some protesters also entered the building. Within our Lifetime, one of the New York-based groups that called for the protest, said the activists wanted the museum to disclose and divest from any Israel-related investments.
But videos of the protest were manipulated to add the red Khamenei banner.
A CBS New York news report, for example, said protesters had scaled the building and displayed the black “Free Palestine” banner, but didn’t mention the red Khamenei banner.
We contacted the Brooklyn Museum and received no response before publication. Just after the protest occurred, a museum spokesperson told newsorganizations that displaying banners inside or affixed to the building violated the museum’s policy and security protocol.
Ghoncheh Habibiazad, a journalist with BBC Monitoring, which reports on mass media worldwide, said on X that the video with the Khamenei banner was digitally altered.
“The original video was filmed in May by a photographer at a pro-Palestinian protest,” she wrote in a June 22 post. “The Khamenei banner doesn’t exist in the real video.”
This video of a banner of Iran’s Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei hanging from New York’s Brooklyn Museum is digitally altered.
The original video was filmed in May by a photographer at a pro-Palestinian protest. The Khamenei banner doesn’t exist in the real video. pic.twitter.com/xhbtbrqL92
— Ghoncheh Habibiazad | غنچه (@GhonchehAzad) June 22, 2024
Tal Hagin, a research fellow with FakeReporter, an Israeli group that reports on online disinformation, also fact-checked an X post that claimed protesters displayed the red Khamenei banner at the Brooklyn Museum.
We rate claims that a video shows a banner with the Iranian supreme leader flying at Brooklyn Museum False.
PolitiFact Researcher Caryn Baird contributed to this report.
A: Like all energy sources, wind farms have some negative environmental impacts. But getting energy from wind farms results in dramatically lower greenhouse gas emissions than getting it from fossil fuels.
FULL QUESTION
I received this post on Facebook today. I know it contains a lot of claims [challenging the eco-friendliness of wind turbines] and I don’t know where to start in terms of validating them (for myself). Can you help out?
FULL ANSWER
A genre of lengthy posts on social media claims to poke holes in measures designed to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and mitigate climate change. The posts throw out numerous statistics without citations, making it difficult to quickly sort fact from fiction.
A reader recently contacted us asking for help evaluating one such post, which cast doubt on the eco-friendliness of wind energy. The post has been circulating on Facebook since March 2021, racking up more than 135,000 shares. Other versions of the post have also been spreading on social media.
Some statistics and statements in the post are arguably accurate, while others are misleading or flat-out wrong. But perhaps more important is what the post left out. It referenced the petroleum products used while building, operating, maintaining and decommissioning wind turbines without ever stating that over its entire life cycle, a wind turbine produces among the lowest greenhouse gas emissions of the main electricity sources in the U.S.
The post also misleadingly said that the land for wind farms “would have to be clear-cut land” and referenced the need to cut down “all those trees.” But in the U.S., wind farms are largely located on land that is already not forested, and this is likely to remain the case as wind energy expands.
The post discussed the landfill space needed for decommissioned wind turbine blades without providing the context that, even as wind power increases, they will make up a small percentage of all waste, and without mentioning efforts to recycle them. And it referenced bird deaths from wind farms without putting them in the context of far greater threats to birds, such as collisions with glass buildings and vehicles.
We consulted experts on wind energy to get to the bottom of the claims made in the post, and to provide context on the challenges associated with this source of renewable energy.
Wind Turbines Generate Low Emissions Over Their Lifetimes
The major advantage of wind turbines is that, taking into account their entire lifespan, they generate very low emissions compared with fossil fuels.
Researchers often calculate greenhouse gas emissions associated with methods of electricity generation using a technique called life cycle assessment. In the case of wind energy, this includes emissions generated in the course of “extraction and processing of materials, fabrication of components, transportation, installation, operations and maintenance … decommissioning, and disposal or recycling,” Aubryn Cooperman, an engineering analyst at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory, told us via email.
“Each of these processes may have emissions associated with the equipment used, such as trucks, cranes, ships, etc.,” she said. “Petroleum-based fuels are used for most types of transportation and portable equipment, and the related emissions are accounted for in the wind energy lifecycle assessment.”
In the case of fossil fuels, a life cycle assessment of greenhouse gas emissions also includes emissions caused by burning the fuel, such as coal or natural gas.
A report from NREL reviewed studies of life cycle greenhouse gas emissions for various sources of electricity. The median published estimates of emissions associated with wind were more than 37 times lower than those from natural gas and 77 times lower than those from coal.
Over their lifetimes, wind farms also are associated with very little generation of air pollutants such as particulate matter and ground-level ozone.
Despite this, the Facebook post misleadingly implied that because petroleum products can be used in various ways in building, operating, maintaining and removing wind turbines, this means that they do not qualify as clean energy.
First, the post presented various statistics on the lubricant oil in wind turbines, used in varying amounts depending on the turbine. To be clear, this oil is used to lubricate the moving parts in wind turbines and is distinct from fuels such as gasoline that are combusted and produce greenhouse gas emissions.
“Now you have to calculate every city across the nation, large and small, to find the grand total of yearly oil consumption from ‘clean’ energy,” the post said. “Where do you think all that oil is going to come from, the fricken oil fairies?”
The post went on to describe the use of petroleum products by “the large equipment needed to build these wind farms,” as well as service, maintain and remove them.
As we’ve said, emissions from petroleum product-powered equipment associated with wind farms are included in life cycle emissions calculations, and these indicate that wind farms are far cleaner sources of energy than fossil fuels.
“It’s also worth noting that as the transportation sector decarbonizes, that will reduce emissions in the wind energy lifecycle as well,” Cooperman said.
As for the lubricant oil used in wind turbines, this oil does need to be changed from time to time, which can be challenging given the locations and height of the turbines. However, it does not necessarily need to be changed annually, contrary to what the post said.
“Oil change interval on wind turbines has been extended over the years and nowadays, it is typical to do every 5 or 7 years,” Shawn Sheng, a senior research engineer at NREL, told us in an email. “Some research is being done by extending this even further to ten years or longer, such as fill-for-life (~20 years) oil.”
Emissions associated with changing this oil are included in life cycle emissions calculations, Cooperman said.
Many machines require lubricant oil, and the wind industry makes up only a fraction of the market for these products. Furthermore, lubricants only make up 1% of petroleum products produced in U.S. refineries.
Post Distorts Wind Farm Land Use Impacts
Next, the Facebook post listed various statistics about wind farm land use, mixing somewhat plausible figures with estimates based on bad math and misleading statements about impacts on forests.
“And just exactly how eco-friendly is wind energy anyway?” the post said. “Each turbine requires a footprint of 1.5 acres, so a wind farm of 150 turbines needs 225 acres…” This estimate is roughly plausible if considering the direct footprint of a relatively new, average-sized land-based wind turbine, but it doesn’t acknowledge the wide variation in turbine size.
Grace Wu, who studies land use and climate change mitigation at UC Santa Barbara, told us via email that the science and engineering community would not calculate the space requirements of a wind farm per turbine, but rather per unit of energy the wind farm can produce.
“The larger the wind turbine the more spacing it required, so to generalize across wind turbines itself (treating the unit as the wind turbine) is inaccurate,” she said. Wind turbines can have one megawatt of capacity to over 10 megawatts of capacity, Wu explained. Offshore wind turbines can be greater than 20 megawatts.
A May 2024 U.S. Department of Agriculture report on utility-scale solar and wind installations in rural areas said that the typical direct footprint of a wind farm is approximately 0.74 acres per megawatt of capacity. The direct footprint of a wind farm includes “the relatively small area on which service roads, turbine pads, and other infrastructure are constructed,” the report said.
Wind turbine capacity has been increasing. The average land-based wind turbine installed in 2022 can generate 3.2 megawatts of electricity, according to a report from the U.S. Department of Energy. Based on this, the average land-based turbine installed in 2022 would have a direct footprint of more than two acres.
Wind farms also have an indirect footprint, the USDA report explained, since wind turbines need sufficient spacing between them to best take advantage of wind flow. However, the land between wind turbines often can still be used for other purposes — typically for growing crops or as rangeland.
Photo by mj0007 via iStock / Getty Images Plus
The post’s math and logic went more seriously awry as it discussed the broader impacts of wind farm land use. “In order to power a city the size of NYC you’d need 57,000 acres; and who knows the astronomical amount of land you would need to power the entire US,” the post said.
Here, the post did its own internal math incorrectly. The post previously had claimed it would take 3,800 turbines to power a city the size of New York, and 3,800 multiplied by the post’s estimated footprint of 1.5 acres per turbine is 5,700 acres, not 57,000 acres.
A spokesperson from the U.S. Energy Information Administration told us via email that it “would be impossible” to accurately calculate the number of turbines needed to power a city without knowing various other factors, including the height of the turbines, wind speed and generation capacity.
The USDA report found that in 2020, there were 88,000 acres in rural areas of the U.S. in the direct footprint of wind farms. As of 2023, 10% of U.S. electricity came from wind farms, according to the EIA. For context, the U.S. has 897 million acres of farmland.
The post’s suggestion that the entire U.S. would be solely powered by wind farms is unrealistic. According to EIA projections for 2050, even in a high-uptake scenario a minority of electricity in the U.S. would be generated by wind, with solar power showing a greater increase. “There is no scenario we have modeled in which there would be only one source of electricity generation in the United States,” the EIA spokesperson told us.
The post also did not put the land use requirements of wind farms in the context of land use requirements of other methods of generating electricity. A 2022 study published in PLOS One indicated that, when looking just at the direct footprint, natural gas and coal use more land per unit of energy generated than wind.
However, “the answer differs significantly depending on whether or not one considers spacing between turbines,” Wu said. Wind is more space-intensive than most other energy sources when taking into account the full area of wind farms.
The Facebook post misleadingly said that the land used by wind farms would all need to be clear cut. “Boy, cutting down all those trees is gonna piss off a lot of green-loving tree-huggers,” the post said.
Building wind farms does sometimes require trees to be cut down. But Wu explained that in the U.S., wind farms are largely located on existing agricultural land in the Midwest. “There are of course *some* cases of wind farms in forest land, but the vast majority of wind capacity has and will be sited in the ‘wind belt’ (midwest),” she said.
According to the USDA report, between 2012 and 2020 just around 3% of newly built wind farms were located on forest land.
Wind Turbine Blades Represent Small Proportion of All Waste
The Facebook post also painted a misleading picture of what happens to wind turbine blades at the end of their life.
“They cannot economically be reused, refurbished, reduced, repurposed, or recycled so guess what..? It’s off to special landfills they go,” the post said. “And guess what else..? They’re already running out of these special landfill spaces for the blades that have already exceeded their usefulness.”
Claire Barlow, a sustainability and materials engineer at the University of Cambridge, explained to us in an email that there are real challenges associated with the end of life of wind turbine blades. She said that the “normal lifetime” of a wind turbine is 20 to 25 years, and that the blades currently being decommissioned generally come from a time when wind energy was “starting to take off in a big way” — particularly in Europe and China. This means that “the number of end-of-life blades coming through will increase hugely in the next decade, and steadily after that.”
Putting them in landfills is the cheapest way to dispose of wind turbine blades, Barlow said. It is least expensive to simply bury the blades near the wind farms they came from, if there is space. “‘Special’ landfills yes, but not in the sense of meaning dangerous or difficult,” she said.
A Wind Energy End-of-Service Guide from the DOE explained that as of 2018, wind turbine blades sent to landfills represented 0.017% of “combined municipal solid waste and construction and demolition waste” in the U.S. The report said that by 2050 wind turbine blade waste would represent less than 0.15% of total waste, in a calculation using 2018 total waste levels.
Barlow went on to explain that in more densely populated areas, such as Northern Europe, there is less space to dispose of wind turbines via landfills and it is even banned in some areas. This means there’s an incentive to find alternate options.
“There is a great deal of work going on in finding economically (and environmentally) attractive solutions for end-of-life blade material, some of which are already commercially successful enterprises, and others that are busy scaling up from prototypes to full-scale,” she said.
The majority of wind turbine parts are readily recyclable, according to the DOE guide. “Blades are difficult to recycle because they are made from mixed materials which can’t easily be separated,” Barlow said.
The most basic recycling method, she said, “involves cutting up blades into small pieces (a few cm, or smaller for some applications) and using this material as filler in material used for road or playground surfaces, where it contributes useful strength.” There are companies using this approach, although “this recycled material isn’t high-value,” she said.
The DOE guide said that this and other recycling approaches are “increasingly being used in the United States,” although the majority of blades are still sent to landfills and the number of blades that are recycled “is difficult to determine.”
People are currently attempting to develop better processes for separating “potentially valuable fibres” out of the blades so they can be reused, Barlow said. There are challenges, but “real significant advances are being made,” she said.
The blades also “can safely be disposed of in modern well-controlled” waste-to-energy power plants, she said, although these are more common in Northern Europe than the U.S. There is also at least one operation in the U.S., she said, and others outside the country that are using wind turbine blades as fuel during the cement-making process.
Wind Turbine Impacts on Birds Need Context
Finally, the Facebook post brought up bird deaths caused by wind turbines. This, again, is a real problem, but the claims in the post are missing context, including that there are far greater causes of bird deaths.
“Oops, I almost forgot about the 500,000 birds that are killed each year from wind turbine blade collisions; most of which are endangered hawks, falcons, owls, geese, ducks, and eagles,” the post said. “Apparently smaller birds are more agile and able to dart and dodge out of the way of the spinning blades, whereas the larger soaring birds aren’t so lucky. I’m sure the wildlife conservationist folks are just ecstatic about that. I’m so glad the wind energy people are looking out for the world.”
Estimates vary for the total bird deaths from wind turbines. A 2020 report based on the American Wind Wildlife Information Center database, which compiles data from multiple studies, concluded that the median estimate for mortality was 1.3 bird deaths per megawatt of wind capacity per year.
Given that the total wind power capacity of the U.S. is more than 150,000 megawatts, this would represent around 200,000 bird deaths per year. Other work, done using data from 2012, estimated up to more than 500,000 bird deaths per year — and bird deaths would be expected to have risen as significantly more wind turbines have been built.
The Facebook post does not put wind turbine-related deaths in the context of other threats to birds. According to median estimates compiled in 2017 by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, bird deaths from wind turbine collisions are dwarfed by bird deaths from collisions with building glass, estimated to kill nearly 600 million birds annually, collisions with vehicles, estimated to kill more than 200 million birds a year, and encounters with cats, estimated to kill 2.4 billion birds a year.
The post’s claim that most bird deaths are among large birds is incorrect. According to the AWWIC report, median estimates were for 1.3 small bird deaths per megawatt of wind capacity per year, compared with 0.24 deaths for large birds and 0.06 deaths for raptors.
However, it is true that researchers have particular concerns about raptor deaths from wind turbine collisions, due to their relatively small populations and reproductive life histories. Raptor deaths from wind turbines may have an outsized impact on their population size.
A final piece of context: Birds facemajorthreats to their diversity and abundance from climate change. By providing an alternative form of energy with reduced greenhouse gas emissions, wind turbines may help mitigate climate change-related threats to birds.
Editor’s note: SciCheck’s articles providing accurate health information and correcting health misinformation are made possible by a grant from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. The foundation has no control over FactCheck.org’s editorial decisions, and the views expressed in our articles do not necessarily reflect the views of the foundation.
A wire-enclosed “baby cage” was invented in 1922 to suspend toddlers outside of apartment building windows to get “proper fresh air.”
Rating:
Sometimes we just don’t get it quite right. One example is a wire-enclosed “baby cage” said to have been invented in 1922 as a way to suspend toddlers outside of apartment building windows as a means to give them “proper fresh air.”
Photographs and videos of the supposed invention have been shared on social media platforms for years. The most recent post we found about the claim went viral in June 2024, having more than 134,000 likes at the time of publication:
We fact-checked this claim in November 2023 and found the peculiar contraption was indeed real, despite its apparent dangers.
Snopes conducted a keyword search of “baby cage patent 1922” and found the invention was genuine. U.S. Patent 1448235 was described as a “Portable Baby Cage” and was filed on July 19, 1922, by Emma Read, a self-described resident of Spokane, Washington, at the time.
The patent was approved on March 13, 1923, and expired on the same day in 1940. It read, in part:
It is well known that a great many difficulties arise in raising and properly housing babies and small children in crowded cities, that is to say from the health viewpoint. This is especially true with reference to babies and young children, who at present are being raised in large apartments, as a result of not obtaining the proper fresh air, as well as being outdoors, for such air and exercise.
In crowded cities, where the houses are closely arranged, and in large apartments, there is no way for proper ventilation. Back and front yards are small, while those living in apartments have no facilities whatever, to permit the children and babies to receive proper fresh air from the outside.
With these facts in view, it is the purpose of the present invention to provide an article of manufacture for babies and young children, to be suspended upon the exterior of a building adjacent an open window, wherein the baby or young child may be placed. This article of manufacture comprises a housing or cage, wherein the baby or young child together with proper toys may be placed. The baby is enabled to receive fresh air through the screen or wire fabric, and it will be noted that the baby has sufficient room or space for playing with toys…
The description goes on to explain that “suitable bed clothing” may also be arranged in the cage to allow for proper napping facilities made up with “suitable curtains.”
The figures below also accompanied the patent, which provided dimensions and construction information for the cage:
(Google Patents)
Snopes has a history of investigating the origins of what appear to be bizarre inventions of the past, including a device that enabled its user to smoke an entire pack of 20 cigarettes at once and plastic cone-shaped face masks to supposedly protect people against snowstorms.
Sources
“A Nanny Supervising a Baby Suspended in a Wire Cage Attached to The…” Getty Images, https://www.gettyimages.co.uk/detail/news-photo/nanny-supervising-a-baby-suspended-in-a-wire-cage-attached-news-photo/3136964. Accessed 2 Nov. 2023.
Dapcevich, Madison. “Is This a Real Vintage Device for Smoking a Whole Pack of Cigs at Once?” Snopes, 25 Oct. 2023, https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/vintage-smoking-device/.
—. “Real Vintage ‘Baby Cages’ to Give Toddlers Fresh Air?” Snopes, 7 Nov. 2023, https://www.snopes.com//fact-check/vintage-window-baby-cages-for-toddlers-fresh-air/.
—. “Vintage Pic Shows Bizarre ‘Blizzard Cones’ To Protect Faces from Snow?” Snopes, 3 Sept. 2023, https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/vintage-pic-cones-mask/.
Emma, Read. Portable Baby Cage. US1448235A, 13 Mar. 1923, https://patents.google.com/patent/US1448235A/en.
“Https://Twitter.Com/Historyinmemes/Status/1718535800634159248.” X (Formerly Twitter), https://twitter.com/historyinmemes/status/1718535800634159248. Accessed 2 Nov. 2023.
PollutionOk9449. “Baby Cages Invented in 1922 so That Babies Could Be ‘Aired’.” R/Damnthatsinteresting, 31 Oct. 2023, www.reddit.com/r/Damnthatsinteresting/comments/17kr9wp/baby_cages_invented_in_1922_so_that_babies_could/.
A video appearing in social media feeds warns of “something big” as a camera pans along a section of tall black fencing in front of what appears to be the U.S. Supreme Court building.
“What’s happening?” text in the video says. “BREAKING: Fences have been installed around the Supreme Court. Something big is coming.”
A June 17 Instagram post sharing the video was flagged as part of Meta’s efforts to combat false news and misinformation on its News Feed. (Read more about our partnership with Meta, which owns Facebook and Instagram.)
This footage is old. Mitchell Miller, a reporter for WTOP-FM in Washington, D.C., shared it on X in May 2022.
“Fencing now surrounds the U.S. Supreme Court following protests and the leak of the draft decision that could overturn Roe v. Wade,” Miller wrote then.
PolitiFact asked the Supreme Court whether any similar fencing is now outside of the court but didn’t immediately hear back. However, we found no credible news reports saying as much.
What we’re certain of: this video is not from 2024.
We rate claims that it shows fencing recently erected around the court False.
On Monday, the Supreme Court declined to hear two Covid-related appeals brought by Children’s Health Defense, the anti-vaccine group founded by independent presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. This decision leaves lower court rulings against the group in place.
One case challenged the FDA’s emergency authorization of Covid-19 vaccines in December 2020, claiming the vaccines were “ineffective and lacked proper vetting.” The 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals found that Kennedy’s group did not have legal standing to sue. The other case was against Rutgers University over its Covid-19 vaccine mandate. The 3rd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals concluded that the plaintiffs “have not stated any plausible claim for relief.”
Kennedy, who left the group in April 2023 to run for president, is listed as a lawyer on the Rutgers filing at the Supreme Court. Despite his leave of absence, he spoke at a Children’s Health Defense conference in November, downplaying his anti-vaccine activity on the campaign trail.
In a related matter, the court also turned away a challenge to Connecticut’s decision to repeal a religious exemption for school vaccinations.
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Media Bias Fact Check selects and publishes fact checks from around the world. We only utilize fact-checkers who are either a signatory of the International Fact-Checking Network (IFCN) or have been verified as credible by MBFC. Further, we review each fact check for accuracy before publishing. We fact-check the fact-checkers and let you know their bias. When appropriate, we explain the rating and/or offer our own rating if we disagree with the fact-checker. (D. Van Zandt)
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The lake is not natural, and it was explicitly designed to look like the shape of Finland.
Socialmediaaccounts and websites dedicated to quirky travel content often share an image of a small body of water — Lake Neitokainen — that appears to be shaped just like the nation in which it resides: Finland.
While use of the word “lake” may be a stretch, there is indeed a human-made body of water in a desolate and sparsely inhabited part of northern Finland that was designed to be a 1:10,000 model of Finland itself.
More accurately described as a pond, Lake Neitokainen was to be the centerpiece of a tourist village that was never built. It can be viewed on Google Maps:
In the late 1980s, a booming economy and interest in arctic tourism and skiing led the company Polartrio to develop land in the Lappland region of Finland — an area well above the Arctic circle. As reported by the Finnish outlet Veikkaus in 2015, Polartrio had plans to build a hotel and dozens of holiday cabins for skiers and tourists.
The primary construction manager for the project, Esko Sääskilahti, described the process behind modifying an existing pond in the area, noting that the whole project took only a week to complete (Translated by Google):
On his free evenings, [Sääskilahti] looked at the site plans of the holiday village and thought about what could be done with the planned pond in the middle of the village. Sääskilahti began to stretch it into a lake. …
When Polartrio finally approved Sääskilahti’s Suomi plan, a week was given to build the lake. Sääskilahti drew a line from Porvoo to Nuorgam and calculated a ratio of one to ten thousand as the appropriate size for the lake.
All you needed to outline the pool was a tape measure, a prism and a few sticks. The lake was built in a week with two excavators and the help of a few men in late summer 1991. It became 116 meters long and one meter deep.
By 1991, Finland’s economy had plunged into a full-blown depression, decimating the tourist industry and the demand for Arctic resorts. The area surrounding the lake was, beginning in 1991, inhabited by a group of European-descended, self-described Indians who belonged to a faux-naturalist movement known as the Iriadamant.
The group was deported in 1993, and the land — besides the pond-turned-lake — remained undeveloped at the time of this reporting. “Sometimes the floods stretched the borders a little towards Russia and Sweden. But it looks like it will stay there,” Sääskilahti told Veikkaus in 2015.
Because photos show an actual body of water in Finland that matches the political borders of Finland, and because its existence and story has been well-documented, we rate the claim as “True.”
Sources
Herva, Vesa-Pekka, et al. “‘Indians’ in Lapland: The Iriadamant Community, Monocultural Ethos and the Materialities and Geographies of Marginality in Recent Past Finland.” Journal of Contemporary Archaeology, vol. 8, no. 2, May 2022. DOI.org (Crossref), https://doi.org/10.1558/jca.21214.
Honkapohja, Seppo, and Erkki Koskela. “The Economic Crisis of the 1990s in Finland.” Economic Policy, vol. 14, no. 29, Oct. 1999, pp. 399–436. DOI.org (Crossref), https://doi.org/10.1111/1468-0327.00054.
Pop star Justin Timberlake was arrested and charged with driving while intoxicated June 18, prompting both real and fake reporting on what happened after a police officer in Sag Harbor, New York, pulled over his car.
“Justin Timberlake allegedly had traces of molly, poppers, Truvada, and coke in his bloodstream following his DWI arrest in New York,” text over a 2023 photo of Timberlake says, referring to MDMA and a medication used to treat HIV.
“Make it make sense,” a June 18 Facebook post sharing the photo said. “Why is he driving himself I don’t get these celebrities you want to drive yourself when you’re intoxicated but have someone chauffeur you while you sober.”
A Threads post shared a screenshot of an X post with the same text and image. But the X account’s handle is suspicious: Poo Crave.
These posts were flagged as part of Meta’s efforts to combat false news and misinformation on its News Feed. (Read more about our partnership with Meta, which owns Facebook and Instagram.)
The logo for Poo Crave resembles the logo for Pop Crave, a pop culture website.
Poo Crave, however, describes itself as a satire page.
“Spinning in a whirlwind of pop parody and chaos,” its X bio says. “Plop into #PooCrave for all things te, drama and social media. #Satire.”
We found no credible reporting to corroborate the claims in that X post or others that failed to attribute it as satire. The New York Times reported that an arrest report said Timberlake had “bloodshot and glassy” eyes and a “strong odor” of alcohol on his breath.
Some information about his arrest is available. He refused to submit to an alcohol test, for example, and he was released later that day without bail, the Times said. But much is still unknown.
Relying on publicly available information, records and reporting as of June 21, we rate claims that drugs including MDMA were found in Timberlake’s bloodstream following his June 21 arrest False.
In speeches in Nevada and Arizona, former President Donald Trump continued to spread misinformation that undermines public confidence in state and federal elections:
Trump claimed that Kari Lake lost the Arizona governor’s race in 2022 because Maricopa County “machines just happened to be broken” — falsely adding, “only the Republican machines.” Some printers produced ballots that were too light for on-site tabulators, but the ballots could be counted later. Lake’s court challenges failed, and an independent review found no evidence of wrongdoing.
Trump also claimed, without evidence, that Abraham Hamadeh lost the 2022 attorney general’s race in Arizona because “his election was rigged.” A recount confirmed Hamadeh lost the election, and court challenges failed, too, due to a lack of evidence.
In Nevada, Trump — who was indicted by a federal grand jury for allegedly conspiring to remain in office despite losing the 2020 presidential election — whitewashed the violence on Jan. 6, 2021, when his supporters attacked the U.S. Capitol as Congress met to count the electoral votes that would declare Joe Biden the winner.
“All they were doing is protesting a rigged election. And then the police say, ‘Go in, go in’” to the Capitol, he said of his supporters. “What a setup that was.”
As we have written before, nearly 140 law enforcement officers were injured trying to keep the protesters out of the U.S. Capitol that day, according toofficial reports. There’s also no evidence the 2020 election was “rigged” or that Trump supporters were the victims of an FBI “setup.”
Trump, the presumptive presidential nominee of the Republican Party, made his remarks at a town hall event in Phoenix on June 6 and at a rally in Las Vegas on June 9. The former president lost Arizona and Nevada to Biden in 2020. Biden won by only 10,457 votes in Arizona, which remains a key swing state in 2024.
Kari Lake’s Defeat
As presidential candidates usually do when visiting a state, Trump introduced some of Arizona’s Republican candidates when he spoke in Phoenix — including Hamadeh, a House candidate for the 8th Congressional District, and Lake, who is now running for the U.S. Senate.
In his introductions, Trump falsely claimed that the U.S. doesn’t have “honest elections,” and went on to baselessly claim that Hamadeh and Lake were victims of election fraud in 2022.
Trump, June 6: A congressional candidate who’s doing a really terrific job — his election was rigged the last time, I will tell you that. They don’t like — they say, “Oh, please. Don’t say that.” These elections, let me tell, if we could have honest elections in this country, I would have stopped campaigning two weeks ago. We would’ve had it made. But we don’t have that. … Congressional candidate, Abe Hamadeh.
And a friend of mine, and a really incredible woman, who’s worked very hard, and she had another one of those elections, the machines just happened to be broken. Only the Republican machines, however. That was a strange situation. She had lines going back 2 miles. And I’m sorry, sir, you’ll have to come back about 12 o’clock in the evening. The machines happen to be broken.
Let’s look at Lake’s election first, and Trump’s false claim that she lost because “Republican machines” failed on Election Day.
Lake lost the 2022 governor’s race to then-Secretary of State Katie Hobbs by more than 17,000 votes. She blamed her defeat on election fraud, making multiple claims in a lawsuit filed Dec. 9, 2022 — including one that Trump referenced when he spoke of “broken machines.”
Trump is referring to a problem with Maricopa County’s ballot-on-demand printers at some polling locations on Election Day. As we wrote a day after the Nov. 8, 2022, election, Maricopa County said the printers produced ballots for a period of time that were too light for the on-site ballot tabulators to read. Until the problem was resolved, election officials advised voters to leave their completed ballot in a secure box to be tabulated later.
Former President Donald Trump arrives for a campaign rally at Sunset Park in Las Vegas on June 9. Photo by Brandon Bell/Getty Images.
Lake sued, claiming that her voters were disenfranchised. But she lost her lawsuit and subsequent appeals.
“Plaintiff’s own expert acknowledged that a ballot that was unable to be read at the vote center could be deposited by a voter, duplicated by a bipartisan board onto a readable ballot, and—in the final analysis—counted,” Maricopa County Superior Court Judge Peter Thompson wrote in his Dec. 24, 2022, decision.
“Lake’s claim thus boils down to a suggestion that election-day issues led to long lines at vote centers, which frustrated and discouraged voters, which allegedly resulted in a substantial number of predominately Lake voters not voting. But Lake’s only purported evidence that these issues had any potential effect on election results was, quite simply, sheer speculation,” the Arizona Court of Appeals, Division One, wrote in a Feb. 16, 2023 ruling.
Lake appealed, but the state Supreme Court declined to hear her case.
“The Court of Appeals aptly resolved these issues, most of which were the subject of evidentiary proceedings in the trial court, and Petitioner’s challenges on these grounds are insufficient to warrant the requested relief under Arizona or federal law,” the high court said.
There is also no evidence that the printer failure was part of a plot to elect a Democrat.
“The premise that Vote Centers with issues were ‘Republican Machines’ isn’t possible,” Jennifer Liewer, a spokesperson for the county elections department, told us in an email. “Maricopa County uses a vote anywhere model so a voter can check in to any Vote Center, have their ballot printed, and then tabulated on election day. There are not ‘republican’ or ‘democrat’ Vote Centers.”
In our analysis of the precincts with the problematic printers, we found more than 70,000 votes were cast for the Democratic and Republican candidates in each of the gubernatorial and attorney general races, and the votes were roughly equally divided between the two major party candidates.
But what caused the problem?
The county attorney’s office hired a retired judge to determine what happened and how the county can prevent it from happening again.
In a report, released April 10, 2023, former Arizona Supreme Court Chief Justice Ruth McGregor blamed “equipment failure” for the problems on Election Day. Some of the on-site printers couldn’t “reliably” print the general election ballots, which were longer and heavier than those used in the primary election, the report said. The printer problems occurred at 37 of the county’s 223 vote centers, Liewer told us.
“[T]he primary cause of the election day failures was equipment failure,” McGregor’s report said. “Despite the assurances of the manufacturer, many of the Oki B432 printers were not capable of reliably printing 20-inch ballots on 100-pound paper under election-day conditions. Any failure in process or human error relates to a failure to anticipate and prepare for the printer failures experienced. But nothing we learned in our interviews or document reviews gave any clear indication that the problems should have been anticipated.”
McGregor’s report provided some idea of the scope of the problem: “Two-thirds of the general election vote centers reported no issues with misprinted ballots; approximately 94 percent of election day ballots were not faulty.”
Lastly, there was no recount in the governor’s race, because the race wasn’t close enough to trigger a mandatory recount. But there were hand audits performed in 12 of the state’s 15 counties, including Maricopa, which audited the governor’s race, as well as two other races and a ballot question.
State law requires county election officers to count “a sample of ballots to test the accuracy of the vote tabulation equipment if there is participation from the county political parties,” as explained on the secretary of state website. All 12 counties that participated passed the audit — including Maricopa. The audit involved about 5,000 ballots in Maricopa County and resulted in no net change for Lake or Hobbs.
Abraham Hamadeh’s Defeat
Trump also claimed that Hamadeh’s election — which was a lot closer than Lake’s election — was “rigged.” But again, the losing Republican candidate failed to produce the evidence needed to convince the courts.
Hamadeh lost the 2022 attorney general’s race to Democrat Kris Mayes by only 280 votes out of 2.5 million ballots — and that was after a statewide recount that cut Mayes’ lead nearly in half, according to the official results.
Like Lake, Hamadeh claimed, among other things, that “thousands of voters were disenfranchised” in Maricopa County, and he sought to overturn the election results. Hamadeh filed a complaint in Mohave County Superior Court on Dec. 9, 2022. But, notably, the complaint did not allege fraud or wrongdoing.
“The Plaintiffs are not, by this lawsuit, alleging any fraud, manipulation or other intentional wrongdoing that would impugn the outcomes of the November 8, 2022, general election,” the complaint read, according to AZCentral, a news website that includes the state’s largest newspaper, the Arizona Republic.
At a Dec. 23, 2022, hearing, Hamadeh’s attorney, Timothy La Sota, repeated to the court that the complaint was not alleging fraud. “We said in our complaint we are ‘not alleging any fraud, manipulation or other intentional wrongdoing,’” La Sota said. “So, we did not allege intentional misconduct.”
That same day, Mohave County Superior Court Judge Lee F. Jantzen rejected Hamadeh’s lawsuit. “The bottom line is you just haven’t proven your case,” Jantzen told La Sota.
Hamadeh filed a motion for a new trial, but Jantzen denied the motion. In his July 17, 2023, ruling, Jantzen said that Hamadeh failed to satisfy the requirements for a new trial, because there were no irregularities or errors of law in the first trial, and there was no “newly discovered material evidence that could not have been discovered” at the first trial.
Days later, Hamadeh appealed Jantzen’s decision to the Arizona Court of Appeals, which rejected Hamadeh’s motion in a 2-1 ruling in April.
“A virtual firestorm of challenges followed the 2022 general election. Those flames have subsided. The winners were announced and took their oaths of office more than 15 months ago,” Chief Judge David B. Gass wrote for the majority. “This case, one of the last embers still glowing, does not burn hot enough to warrant relief.”
Protesters at U.S. Capitol and the ‘Rigged’ Election
In Nevada, Trump once again minimized the actions of those who stormed the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, saying his supporters were only there to protest a “rigged election” and falsely alleging that police told protesters to “go in” to the Capitol.
We have debunked this bit of revisionist history on more thanone occasion from others who sought to distort the mission and actions of the officers that day.
In reality, the police were trying to prevent the crowd that attended Trump’s “Save America” rally at the White House Ellipse from disrupting the electoral vote count that was scheduled for that same day at the Capitol.
Pro-Trump supporters clash with law enforcement at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, in Washington, D.C. Photo by Kent Nishimura / Los Angeles Times via Getty Images.
In the course of defending the Capitol and protecting the vice president and lawmakers and their staffs, the U.S. Capitol Police said 73 of its officers were injured, and the Metropolitan Police Department of the District of Columbia reported 65 injuries, according to a bipartisan report by two Senate committees.
“Throughout the seven hours of the riot on the Capitol grounds, law enforcement officers faced verbal and ‘absolutely brutal,’ violent physical abuse,” the report said. “One officer described an interaction with a group of protestors during the evacuation of the Senate: ‘[W]e stopped several men in full tactical gear and they stated ‘You better get out of our way boy or we’ll go through you to get [the Senators].’”
The report said the officers were “physically assaulted with a range of objects thrown from the crowds, pinned against surfaces, and beaten with flag poles and other weapons carried or found by rioters, including frozen water bottles.” The rioters also used pepper spray and other chemical irritants against officers.
Trump has called the rioters “patriots,” “hostages” and “warriors,” hinting that he would pardon them if he becomes president again. He said in Nevada that they were victims of “a setup” — which is a reference to a debunked theory that the FBI infiltrated and egged on the pro-Trump supporters, so they could be arrested.
As we have written, FBI Director Christopher Wray, who was appointed by Trump, addressed that discredited theory at a congressional hearing in November 2022. “To the extent that there’s a suggestion, for example, that the FBI’s confidential human sources or FBI employees in some way instigated or orchestrated January 6 — that’s categorically false,” Wray told Congress.
The notion that the 2020 presidential election was “rigged” is equally without merit.
William Barr, who served as the U.S. attorney general under Trump, told a House committee in testimony released June 13, 2022: “In my opinion then, and my opinion now, is that the election was not stolen by fraud, and I haven’t seen anything since the election that changes my mind on that.”
After the election, top White House aides and other Justice Department officials also told Trump there was no evidence of widespread fraud, but that hasn’t prevented Trump from repeating false fraud claims then and now.
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A photo shows an Arizona truck flag parade breaking the record for the most patriotic display in history, with over 10,000 flags.
Rating:
Context
The America’s Last Line Of Defense Facebook page, which categorizes itself as only posting satirical and parodical content, posted the image. Further, a person using an AI tool created the completely fake image.
On June 18, 2024, the America’s Last Line Of Defense (ALLOD) Facebook page posted a purported photo displaying the words, “Arizona Truck Flag Parade Breaks the Record for the Most Patriotic Display in History With More Than Ten Thousand Flags!” The text caption of the post read, “Good for you, Flagstaff!”
The author of the post added a comment with another purported picture of elderly men riding scooters while wearing patriotic clothing and displaying flags. The author wrote in the comment, “Wow! Amazing! Why don’t pictures like this ever trend?”
However, these pictures did not display real-life events. The ALLOD Facebook page labels itself as a “satire” and “parody” account associated with more than one “entertainment website.” The description of the Facebook page explicitly says its intention is to troll users with inauthentic content. That description reads, “The flagship of the ALLOD network of trollery. Nothing on this page is real.”
Further, an unknown artificial-intelligence (AI) tool created the fake images of the supposed “truck flag parade” in Arizona and the elderly men on rascal scooters. One AI telltale sign was the illegible writing on the trucks’ Ford logos and license plates, as well as the letters on the hats worn by the elderly men on scooters. The hats resembled those reading “Make America Great Again” that supporters of former U.S. President Donald Trump often wear.
Reverse-image searches using both Google Images and TinEye found no further results for these same two photos. It’s unclear if a person unaffiliated with America’s Last Line Of Defense posted the images elsewhere prior to them appearing on the Facebook page.
The caption included with the comment asking why pictures like these don’t trend played as a joke on the many Facebook posts appearing in 2024 showing AI images and asking, “Why don’t pictures like this ever trend?” Such posts sometimes originate from users outside of the U.S. The posts oftenfeaturecomments from users who believe in the authenticity of the images, even though someone used AI to create them.
For background, here is why we sometimes write about satire/humor.
The International Fact-Checking Network (IFCN) at the Poynter Institute has awarded $975,000 in grants to 39 fact-checking organizations in 34 countries, including Ukraine, Egypt, Guatemala, Liberia, Nepal, and Canada. This initiative is part of the Global Fact Check Fund’s second BUILD phase, aimed at enhancing the operational capacity of local and regional fact-checking efforts.
One notable recipient, Stage Media in Liberia, will use the funds to upgrade tools and integrate AI for fact-checking in the Pidgin language. Fast Check of Chile plans to use its $25,000 grant to strengthen its team and develop financial sustainability.
“In this critical election year, the need for accurate information couldn’t be more urgent,” said IFCN director Angie Drobnic Holan. “This vital funding will energize fact-checking organizations, sharpening their skills, amplifying their capabilities, and expanding their reach.”
The grants support 20 IFCN Code of Principles signatories and 19 endorsed non-signatories. A media expert committee selected the winners, who will have nine to twelve months to complete their projects.
To date, the IFCN has distributed $4.85 million of the $12 million fund from Google and YouTube, with five more phases to come.
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Media Bias Fact Check selects and publishes fact checks from around the world. We only utilize fact-checkers who are either a signatory of the International Fact-Checking Network (IFCN) or have been verified as credible by MBFC. Further, we review each fact check for accuracy before publishing. We fact-check the fact-checkers and let you know their bias. When appropriate, we explain the rating and/or offer our own rating if we disagree with the fact-checker. (D. Van Zandt)
Claim Codes: Red= Fact Check on a Right Claim, Blue = Fact Check on a Left Claim, Black = Not Political/Conspiracy/Pseudoscience/Other
Fact Checker bias rating Codes: Red = Right-Leaning, Green = Least Biased, Blue = Left-Leaning, Black = Unrated by MBFC
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A recent Media Bias/Fact Check (MBFC) review has rated the National Organization for Women (NOW) as left-leaning with high credibility. Established in 1966, NOW is a grassroots feminist organization dedicated to promoting feminist ideals and equal rights for women and girls in social, political, and economic sectors.
MBFC’s analysis revealed NOW’s strong alignment with progressive viewpoints, advocating for economic equality, reproductive rights, LGBTQIA+ rights, and racial justice. The NOW Political Action Committee (PAC) endorsed President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris for re-election in 2024, reflecting its left-leaning stance.
While NOW’s content emphasizes progressive issues, MBFC noted that it often lacks counterarguments and alternative perspectives. Articles such as “Women Know That Donald Trump is Guilty of Much More Than 34 Counts of Business Fraud” use strong language aligned with NOW’s progressive views. Some articles, like “Love Your Body: Get the Facts,” lack specific citations, impacting factual accuracy.
Despite these issues, NOW has not had any failed fact checks in the past five years, indicating a commitment to factual reporting. MBFC suggests that NOW could improve by enhancing source citations and offering more balanced viewpoints. Overall, NOW is rated as left-biased and mostly factual in its reporting, with a high credibility rating.
Dystopian novelist George Orwell once wrote or said, “The most effective way to destroy people is to deny and obliterate their own understanding of their history.”
Rating:
English writer George Orwell, whose real name was Eric Arthur Blair, was born in India at the turn of the 20th Century and went on to write commentary on the threat of totalitarianism, democratic socialism, and anti-imperialism in the form of dystopian novels. As a kind of prophetic poster child of dystopia – the term “Orwellian” literally refers to the totalitarian future he wrote of in his book “1984” – quotes on dystopian themes have often been incorrectly attributed to him.
One such quote gained particular traction on multiple social media platforms over the years: “The most effective way to destroy people is to deny and obliterate their own understanding of their history.”
We reached out to the Orwell Society and received the following response from Benedict Cooper, the society’s publicity officer:
I’ve searched for this phrase in the digitised Orwell library and can’t find it. And from what I can see online this has been previously questioned and found to not be backed up with any sources from Orwell, so I would conclude that it is not a real Orwell quote.
As with so many of these misquotes/misattributions, it chimes with much of Orwell’s thinking — the sentiment is echoed in his writing. In Nineteen Eighty-Four of course he does describe in length how the party alters history and destroys aspects of historical record that do not suit its present power base. But there’s no evidence he actually wrote this, and I’ll add that language of this phrase doesn’t sound Orwellian to me.
The Orwell Society’s secretary designate, Chris Harrison, also responded, saying:
This statement is often attributed to Orwell in internet articles but never with any reference to a specific source. We are not aware of it being an authentic Orwell quote. It does roughly correspond to one of the messages in 1984 but is certainly not a direct quote.
We searched a PDF version of “1984,” which the quote is often attributed to, and did not find it. Often quotes like this mysteriously appear on the internet and are shared so many times it becomes nearly impossible to trace where exactly they originated. As far as we can determine, Orwell didn’t utter the statement.
In “1984,” however, messages about the destruction of peoples’ history that Cooper and Harrison alluded to can be found. It’s possible the following passage from “1984” inspired the quote in question:
Every record has been destroyed or falsified, every book has been rewritten, every picture has been repainted, every statue and street and building has been renamed, every date has been altered. And that process is continuing day by day and minute by minute. History has stopped. Nothing exists except an endless present in which the Party is always right.
In sum, Orwell did not write or say: “The most effective way to destroy people is to deny and obliterate their own understanding of their history.” However, the sentiment of the quote appears in many messages in Orwell’s “1984.”
We previously reported on another misattributed Orwell quote: “The further a society drifts from the truth, the more they will hate those that speak it.”
Sources
David Barton Uses Dubious George Orwell Quote – Warren Throckmorton. 10 Aug. 2017, https://wthrockmorton.com/2017/08/10/dubious-george-orwell-quote/.
‘Home’. The Orwell Society, https://orwellsociety.com. Accessed 17 June 2024.
MacGuill, Dan. ‘Did George Orwell Say This About Societies That “Drift From the Truth”?’ Snopes, 20 Sept. 2021, https://www.snopes.com//fact-check/george-orwell-drift-from-truth/.
Nige. ‘Nigeness: As Orwell Didn’t Say…’ Nigeness, 25 Aug. 2017, https://nigeness.blogspot.com/2017/08/as-orwell-didnt-say.html.
Photos from June 2024 authentically depict a pink dolphin seen off the coast of North Carolina.
Rating:
On June 19, 2024, a series of images depicting a pink dolphin supposedly found off the coast of North Carolina went viral on multiple social media platforms, including Facebook, X, TikTok, and Instagram.
We ran the images through AI-detection software Hive, and the results said they were 99% AI-generated.
(Hive)
It appears Facebook account @Alex Lex created the images. The account posted other similarly AI-generated images, including one of someone barbecuing what appeared to be pink dolphins and one of a pink dolphin with a sign around its neck reading “ALEX LEX NEVER LIE.” In another post, he wrote: “Apologies for flooding your Facebook feed with posts about the pink dolphin.”
It appears that the Alex Lex account and Facebook account Outer Banks Vibes – where the images originally went viral with over 53,000 reactions and 8,200 comments – are connected. “Facebook trending today, 179k people talking about it,” the Alex Lex account wrote in a post sharing a screenshot of the Outer Banks Vibes post. We reached out the Alex Lex Facebook account for confirmation and will update this story if we receive a response.
Many people weighed in across social media on the likelihood of a pink dolphin appearing off the coast of North Carolina. While pink dolphins do exist, they are extremely rare. There are two main kinds of pink dolphins: Amazon river dolphins (also known as Pink river dolphins) and albino bottlenose dolphins.
Amazon river dolphins live only in freshwater and are primarily found in the Amazon and Orinoco river basins in Bolivia Brazil, Colombia, Ecuador, Guyana, Peru, and Venezuela, according to the World Wildlife Fund. They appear distinctly different from the bottlenose dolphin seen in the AI-generated images; the head and snout are completely different shapes. Additionally, Amazon river dolphins range from solid gray, to mottled gray and pink, to pink, but their skin pigment does not resemble that seen in the AI-generated images.
Pink River Dolphin or Boto (Inia geoffrensis) (Getty Images)
People have sighted Albino bottlenose dolphins, though also rare, in the wild. A whale museum in Japan also captured an albino dolphin. In 2009, The Guardian published a story about an albino bottlenose dolphin seen in a Lake Calcasieu, a saltwater estuary in Louisiana. As explained in the story:
(The Guardian)
We reached out to the North Carolina Division of Marine Fisheries, who confirmed that they have not received any report of a pink dolphin sighting off the coast of North Carolina.
In sum, because the images appear to have originated from an account that regularly posts AI-generated images, including other AI-generated images depicting pink dolphins, AI-detection software Hive estimated the images to be 99.9% AI-generated, and given the unlikelihood of a pink dolphin appearing off the North Carolina coast, we have rated these photos and this claim “Fake.”
Is Saudi Arabia abandoning the U.S. dollar for its oil sales?
A June 13 X post that purported to show “breaking news” claimed just that: “Saudi Arabia will stop using the US dollar for oil sales and will not renew the 50-year petro-dollar agreement with the U.S.”
That post from the blue-checkmark account Globe Eye News gained more than 1.5 million views and 29,000 likes as of June 18 — but a user-submitted community note was eventually appended, rebutting the post’s claims.
Globe Eye News’ X account links to an Instagram account by the same name. The accounts’ posts do not link to reputable news stories.
One verified Facebook user shared a screenshot of the tweet, asking: “Is this true?”
The post was flagged as part of Meta’s efforts to combat false news and misinformation on its News Feed. (Read more about our partnership with Meta, which owns Facebook and Instagram.)
To answer the Facebook user’s question: No, it’s not true. Global oil market experts told PolitiFact they knew of no evidence that Saudi Arabia intended to stop using the U.S. dollar for oil sales.
(Screenshot from Facebook.)
Patrick De Haan, the head of petroleum analysis at GasBuddy, a website that tracks gas prices, said there is “absolutely no credible proof” that Saudi Arabia plans to stop using the U.S. dollar for oil sales.
The U.S. dollar has been the preferred oil trading currency due to its “global use and stability,” though geopolitical shifts mean some sales happen using other currencies, De Haan said.
Mark Finley, an energy and global oil fellow at Rice University’s Baker Institute for Public Policy, said the U.S. economy is a smaller share of the global economy than it was 50 years ago and that Saudi Arabia has recently worked to diversify its geopolitical alliances, including increasing its ties to Russia and China.
“There is always interest among America’s competitors to challenge the dollar’s dominance in international finance,” he said. “Countries like China and Russia want to develop alternatives to the dollar, both to enhance their own interests and to reduce U.S. influence and leverage.”
However, because modern currency markets are large and actively traded, international companies can complete transactions in dozens of currencies with minimal cost, Finley said.
There’s no proof a formal agreement is being abandoned
The post also claimed that Saudi Arabia would allow a 50-year-old “petrodollar” agreement to expire. Experts told PolitiFact they knew of no such U.S.-Saudi Arabian agreement.
David Wight, a visiting assistant history professor at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, described petrodollars, simply, as dollars “exchanged for the purchase of oil.”
“There was no formal agreement between the U.S. and Saudi governments that Saudi oil was contractually required to be sold in U.S. dollars,” Wight said. He authored “Oil Money: Middle East Petrodollars and the Transformation of US Empire, 1967-1988.”
“When the Saudi oil industry began, it was operated by U.S. companies, so they dealt in U.S. dollars,” Wight said. “Even after Saudi Arabia bought out the U.S. companies over the course of the 1970s, they continued to sell oil for dollars.”
Finley said that after oil shocks in the 1970s, the U.S. government “was keen for Saudi Arabia to spend its oil windfalls on U.S. companies,” to keep using U.S. financial institutions as their international bankers and to view the U.S. as its key ally.
In addition, broad global economic structures encouraged Saudi Arabia to use U.S. currency because “dollars have served as the de facto global currency since World War II,” Wight said.
The closest thing to a 50-year-old U.S.-Saudi Arabia agreement we could find was a Joint Commission on Economic Cooperation. Established in 1974, it encouraged stronger political ties between the countries and supported industrialization in Saudi Arabia — especially when it meant Saudi Arabia would “recycle petrodollars,” or reinvest dollars from its oil sales in American goods, services and assets.
It seems unlikely Saudi Arabia will cast aside the practice of selling oil for U.S. dollars anytime soon.
“Selling oil in dollars is not fundamentally what makes the dollar powerful in global trade,” Wight said. “The power of the dollar in global trade is why most oil is sold for dollars.”
Our ruling
A Facebook post said, “Saudi Arabia will stop using the US dollar for oil sales and will not renew the 50-year petro-dollar agreement with the U.S.”
Global oil market experts said they knew of no evidence that Saudi Arabia intended to stop using the U.S. dollar for oil sales. Geopolitical shifts mean that more oil sales are happening using other currencies, but the U.S. and Saudi Arabia have a long history of economic and political cooperation, and sales of oil in U.S. dollars are expected to continue.
We rate this claim False.
PolitiFact Researcher Caryn Baird contributed to this report.
Israel will send a delegation of about 85 athletes to the Olympic Games in Paris in July. Protesters opposed to the war in Gaza have called for limited participation by the Israelis, and a post on Threads falsely claimed Israel is “out” of the Games. The International Olympic Committee has said Israeli athletes will be allowed to compete.
Full Story
Israel plans to send about 85 athletes to compete in the Olympic Games in Paris next month, its second-largest delegation ever, according to the Times of Israel. But the war in Gaza presents security concerns for Israeli athletes and for the host country.
The fighting in Gaza began after the Palestinian militant group Hamas killed about 1,200 people in Israel and took 250 hostages on Oct. 7, sparking an ongoing assault by Israeli forces that has led to the deaths of more than 37,000 Palestinians, according to the Gaza health ministry.
The Gaza death toll has sparked protests around the world, including an April 30 rally in Paris where pro-Palestinian demonstrators called for limited participation by Israel in the Olympics. The protesters compared Israel’s situation to the International Olympic Committee’s restrictions on Russian athletes’ participation in the Games since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
Protesters stage a demonstration against Israel’s participation in the 2024 Paris Olympics in front of the International Olympic Committee headquarters in Lausanne, Switzerland, on June 12. Photo by Muhammet Ikbal Arslan/Anadolu via Getty Images.
A post on Threads on June 17 took the call for action against Israel a step further, claiming, “ISRAEL OUT OF THE PARIS OLYMPIC GAMES.” Comments on the post said that was “great news.”
But it’s not true that Israel is “out” of the Olympics. IOC President Thomas Bach said on March 6 that Israeli teams and individual athletes will be allowed to compete in the Paris Games, the Associated Press reported. “There is no question about this,” Bach said.
Since the attack on Israeli athletes during the 1972 Munich Olympics, Bach said that “there were always special measures” taken regarding the security of Israeli athletes, and “the same will be true” in Paris, which will include competitions outside stadiums and on the city’s streets, as well as venues in other French cities.
Eleven members of the Israeli delegation were killed in September 1972 during an assault in the Munich Olympic Village by the Palestinian militant group Black September and a failed rescue attempt by the German police. Among other things, the militants sought the release of 200 Palestinians being held at the time in Israeli prisons.
French officials have held rehearsals addressing security concerns for the July 26 opening ceremonies on the Seine River, the Washington Post reported. Security plans include deployment of 45,000 police officers, 18,000 soldiers and 22,000 private contractors, officials said.
Editor’s note: FactCheck.org is one of several organizations working with Facebook to debunk misinformation shared on social media. Our previous stories can be found here. Facebook has no control over our editorial content.
When former President Donald Trump talks about the cost of chicken and eggs, he has often been accurate. But Trump is also prone to exaggerating inflation’s wallop under President Joe Biden.
Biden acknowledges inflation in his speeches, but he often says wages have outpaced inflation — which all depends on when you start.
Many media outlets will cover the first presidential debate, hosted June 27 by CNN, by zeroing in on the best zingers. PolitiFact will focus on the substance, helping voters discover the truth, or lack thereof, in the candidates’ statements.
We monitor the appearances of Biden and Trump for new and repeated claims every day. So far this year, we have published about five dozen fact-checks of the candidates. (We also fact-check Robert F. Kennedy Jr, who is running as an independent; he did not qualify for the CNN debate.)
Based on their patterns, we think we have a good idea of how Biden and Trump might answer questions on important voter topics, including the economy, immigration and health care.
On immigration, for instance, Trump makes baseless statements that provoke fear, including the Pants on Fire claim that immigrants are coming from other countries’ prisons and mental institutions. Biden plucks outdecreases over a short time period that don’t tell the full story about record encounters during his presidency.
Inoculate yourself from the spin of these talking points and more with this fact-checked guide.
Economic claims: Listen for specific time frames, remember COVID-19 impacts
A shopper browses the refrigerated cheese section of a Target store in Sheridan, Colo. (AP)
Trump has said that under Biden the United States has had “record kinds of inflation.”
Inflation peaked around 9% in June 2022 before falling to its current level of about 3% — still higher than voters (and economists) would like, but below the 12% to 15% annual increases in the 1970s and early 1980s. Trump also places all the blame on Biden for rising gasoline prices, even though the price at the pump is beyond a president’s control.
Biden has noted that inflation has dropped on his watch and adds that it has been exceeded by wage increases. That’s accurate for some time measurements but not others. Since Biden’s inauguration, inflation is outpacing wage growth by a few percentage points. However, wages have outpaced inflation over the past year, the past two years and compared with where they were prepandemic.
Nevertheless, Biden has exaggerated some aspects of inflation. He has falsely said inflation “was 9% when I came into office.” When Biden was inaugurated, year-over-year inflation was about 1.4%. Overall, Biden makesa lot of Half Truestatements on the economy.
Biden said Trump is the first president since Herbert Hoover, who was president when the Great Depression began, to see a net loss in jobs. This is numerically accurate — but it disingenuously omits the COVID-19 pandemic’s economic impact during Trump’s fourth year.
Here’s another example using numbers to tell a deceptive story: Biden said the Trump administration “added more to the national debt than any presidential term in American history.” This is accurate — but only until Biden’s own one-term debt total exceeds the amount accumulated under Trump. By the time he leaves office, Biden is projected to have overseen a debt increase larger than Trump’s.
Then there are taxes, which the candidates couldn’t see more differently. Trump often says, falsely, that Biden wants to “quadruple your taxes.” Biden proposed a tax increase of about 7% over the next decade, almost exclusively on the wealthiest Americans and corporations, not the 300% that Trump said.
Biden has frequently said the average federal tax for billionaires is 8.3%, but that’s False. Under the current tax code, the richest Americans pay an effective tax rate of more than 20% on income the government counts. Biden’s 8% figure compares their tax payments with an amount that includes income that is not currently taxed under law, making it a theoretical figure.
Immigration: What to know about Trump’s tactics, Biden’s metrics
Former President Donald Trump talks with Maj. Gen. Thomas Suelzer, Texas’ adjutant general Feb. 29, 2024, at the U.S.-Mexico border in Eagle Pass, Texas. (AP)
Immigration officials have stopped people trying to enter the U.S. illegally 9.5 million times under Biden’s administration, fueling attacks on the president’s immigration record and forcing him to act.
Biden issued a directive June 4 to limit the number of migrants seeking asylum at the southern U.S. border. He took some credit for a recent decline in migrants.
“Due to the arrangements that I’ve reached with (Mexican) President (Andrés Manuel López) Obrador, the number of migrants coming … to our shared border unlawfully in recent months has dropped dramatically,” Biden said.
U.S. Border Patrol data shows immigrant encounters at the U.S.-Mexico border have dropped in recent months. Immigration officials encountered people illegally crossing the border about 128,900 times in April compared with about 250,000 in December. That’s a 48.4% decrease. The numbers of encounters at ports of entry have also dropped. But immigration experts said it’s difficult to pinpoint a single reason for any change in border crossing counts.
Trump uses scare tactics when describing immigrants illegally crossing the U.S. border, telling Americans that immigrants will destroy Social Security benefits, take union jobs and sign up to vote. Those statements are various shades of wrong.
Trump’s statement about jobs of native-born Americans disappearing, for example, focused on one month, obscuring the overall trend under Biden, which showed an increase of 6.2 million jobs for native-born Americans between his inauguration in January 2021 and February 2023.
Only U.S. citizens can vote in federal elections.
Trump falsely and frequently says foreign countries including Venezuela and Congo are releasing immigrants from jails or prisons into the U.S. Local experts and experts on prisons say there is no evidence to back up Trump’s statements.
Health care: Biden paints dire warnings about Trump’s approach to COVID-19 and Affordable Care Act
Trump hasn’t spoken in detail about his health care plans, which has opened the door for Biden to attack his record.
Biden accused Trump of wanting to “terminate” the Affordable Care Act. Trump has floated replacing the Affordable Care Act for years, but Biden left out that Trump recently backtracked.
Trump promised in a Truth Social post to make the Affordable Care Act “much better, stronger, and far less expensive,” without explaining how. Trump’s inconsistency makes it hard to predict what actions he would take if elected.
If a CNN host asks about COVID-19, you might hear Biden bring up bleach. Biden frequently says that Trump told Americans to “inject bleach,” which we’ve rated Mostly False. Trump mused aloud with doctors in the room about the possibility during an April 2020 press conference about potential treatments for the disease; but he didn’t instruct Americans to do it. Trump and his press secretary tried to clarify his words amid criticism the next day.
Abortion: Trump distorts Democrats’ position on abortion while Biden cherry-picks Trump’s statements
For years, Democrats have spotlighted Trump’s 2016 comment that “there has to be some form of punishment” for women who have abortions, which Trump retracted the same day; he said he meant that physicians should be held legally responsible.
Trump’s abortion comments in Time magazine in April gave the Biden campaign more material, but Biden mischaracterized them in a May campaign speech. In the interview, Trump said states may decide to monitor women for legal compliance with abortion laws, and he didn’t share his opinion on whether that was a good idea. Biden told supporters Trump said states “should” monitor women’s pregnancies.
Trump has said that Democrats support abortion measures that allow the “execution” of babies “after birth,” which is False. What Trump describes would be infanticide and is illegal. Situations resulting in a fetal death in the third trimester are rare and typically involve fetal anomalies or life-threatening medical emergencies affecting the pregnant woman.
Israel and Gaza: Trump and Biden highlight their support for Israel
After the Biden administration paused one shipment of 3,500 bombs to Israel, hoping to prevent a full-scale attack on Rafah, a city in Gaza, Trump said, “Biden wants to immediately stop all aid to Israel.” That’s False.
Biden signed legislation in April that provides billions of dollars in supplemental aid to Israel, on top of billions the U.S. already provides annually to Israel. Israel also continues to have access to the U.S.’ foreign military financing program.
Trump may remind voters that he moved the U.S. embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem and that Israel and a few Arab countries in 2020 signed the Abraham Accords. But those accords did not address the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
Trump’s legal battles: He blames Biden, Biden stayed mum during trial
Biden largely avoided discussing the criminal and civil investigations involving the former president until after he wasconvicted.Trump has falsely said that Biden is leading investigations against him, including the Manhattan business records case that resulted in Trump’s felony convictions.
When Trump said Biden “directed” the Manhattan case, we rated that False. Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg hired a former Justice Department prosecutor who investigated Trump when he worked for the New York attorney general. It’s not uncommon for seasoned prosecutors to move among federal, state and local offices, and it doesn’t prove Biden directed the investigation that began before his presidency.
Trump also falsely said he “cooperated far more” than Biden in the classified documents investigations. The special counsel in Biden’s classified documents case said Biden had been cooperative, but the special counsel in Trump’s case found Trump’s cooperation so poor that he sought and obtained indictments on multiple counts for obstructing the investigation.
Biden reaches out to Black and Latino voters with statistics
President Joe Biden speaks to graduating students May 19, 2024, at Morehouse College’s commencement in Atlanta. (AP)
Biden tells Black voters that he remembers “who brung me to the dance” — a nod to Black voters who helped him win the 2020 nomination. Many of his statements about his own record highlight positive economic metrics about the Black community (and metrics for Latinos).
Biden and Trump havesparredover who has produced better results for Black Americans on employment. On this statistic, each has good news. The record low Black unemployment rate was set under Biden in April 2023, at 4.8%. It has risen modestly since then to 6.1% in May 2024, but that’s still lower than it was for much of the first two years under Trump. Still, when Biden set the record, the record he was breaking was Trump’s: 5.3% in August and September 2019.
Crime: Understanding crime trends, and how COVID-19 factors in
Police in Oakland, Calif., salute April 26, 2024, as pallbearers carry the casket of slain officer Jordan Wingate. (AP)
Republican allies of Trump have argued that Biden is responsible for high levels of crime. Biden counters that violent crime has fallen on his watch.
Putting aside the question of a president’s influence on crime trends, Biden has a point that “violent crime is near a record 50-year low,” as he said in May. The FBI’s violent crime rate for 2022, the last year with available data, was 370 per 100,000 population. Since 1972, only two years have had lower violent crime rates: 2014 and 2019.
Biden left out important context when he said that the Trump administration “oversaw the largest increase in murders ever recorded.” The increase in the number of murders from 2019 to 2020 was the largest one-year increase since data was systematically recorded in the early 1960s, but this was largely beyond Trump’s control; experts say the spike stemmed from a confluence of the coronavirus pandemic and the societal upheaval after George Floyd’s murder that year.
Trump has urged voters not to trust data showing falling violent crime because he says the analyses don’t include 30% of cities. This is False: The FBI did struggle with data collection in 2021, but coverage has been back to normal since 2022.
Voting: Here’s what Trump might say about the transition of power
Thousands of people gathered Jan. 6, 2021, at a rally near the White House to support President Donald Trump and his baseless claims of election fraud. (AP)
CNN hosts Jake Tapper or Dana Bash may challenge Trump about his recurring Pants on Fire denials about the 2020 election results, his efforts to lean on officials in Georgia (where the debate is taking place), or his actions to downplay the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol attack.
If Trump doubles down on his election claims, know that elections are administered in thousands of local areas nationwide, each with safeguards, making any attempt to “rig” a national election all but impossible.
Trump has also said that Democrats “used COVID to cheat.” Many states made voting by mail easier during the pandemic, and it was available to all voters — not just Democrats — and is not cheating.
Trump has repeatedly called the Jan. 6 defendants “hostages” or “warriors” and he promised to pardon defendants who stormed the Capitol. He later suggested that he would “consider” doing it. More than 1,457 defendants have been charged in the storming of the U.S. Capitol, including about 500 people who were charged with assaulting, resisting or impeding officers or employees.
PolitiFact Staff Writers Samantha Putterman and Maria Ramirez Uribe contributed to this article.
Former President Donald Trump characterized President Joe Biden’s June 4 immigration order limiting asylum as “pro-child trafficking,” at a June 6 campaign event in Phoenix, Arizona.
Biden’s order “is pro-invasion, pro-child trafficking, pro-women trafficking, pro-human trafficking, pro-drug dealers — and they bring death and destruction into our Country. It’s really pro-illegal immigration…,” Trump also posted June 6 on Truth Social.
Trump echoed thoughts from his former senior adviser, Stephen Miller.
The order “exempts child trafficking to ensure trafficked children are delivered to their US destinations,” Miller said in a June 4 X post.
Biden’s order — barring most people from claiming asylum if they illegally cross into the U.S. between official border crossings — exempts minors traveling without a parent or legal guardian. But does that exemption make it “pro-child trafficking?”
Human trafficking experts we spoke with said no.
The experts said the exemption is in line with federal laws to protect children from trafficking. They said not exempting children could make them vulnerable to dangers, including trafficking. And they pointed out that many of Trump’s own immigration policies also made exceptions for children coming alone.
However, they also acknowledged that some children could end up in dangerous situations under Biden’s policy because family members are not exempt from the policy, even if they come with minors.
If families are unable to cross the border together, or have to wait for long stretches in dangerous conditions in Mexico, parents might send their children alone to the U.S. to seek protection, experts said.
But they agreed this didn’t make Biden’s policy “pro child-trafficking.”
Biden’s policy “does not impact how the government vets the sponsors of unaccompanied children in immigration custody,” said Melissa Adamson, an immigration attorney at National Center for Youth Law, a nonprofit law firm.
Biden’s policy goal is to reduce the strain on immigration officers who are encountering thousands of migrants daily, the White House said in a policy fact sheet. When the policy is in effect, people cannot apply for asylum between ports of entry. The policy takes effect anytime the weekly average of daily illegal border crossings reaches at least 2,500. (Under U.S. law people have to be physically present in the U.S. to seek asylum, regardless of how they cross.)
People who secure an appointment with Customs and Border Protection’s “CBP One” application can still seek asylum at a port of entry. People who are victims of a “severe form of trafficking” are also exempt from the policy. This includes sex or labor trafficking, U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services says on its website.
Why are unaccompanied minors often exempt from border policies?
Laws and court settlements dictate how the government must handle unaccompanied minors who cross the U.S. border. These cases involving minors are handled differently in order to comply with federal laws that protect children from human trafficking.
“Lawmakers recognized that immigrant children traveling without their parents are a vulnerable group that merits protection,” said Chiara Galli, a University of Chicago human development professor. “And that these children should benefit from some added protections that adults who are apprehended at the border do not have.”
Some parents pay for smugglers to get their children to the U.S. border. But smuggling and trafficking are not synonymous; not all children who are smuggled are trafficked, experts said.
Human trafficking “centers on exploitation,” and human smuggling “centers on transportation,” says U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
In 2008, Congress passed the Trafficking Victims Protection Reauthorization Act. The law requires immigration officials to interview all unaccompanied minors for signs that they may be trafficking victims.
Children who are not from Mexico or Canada cannot be quickly deported and are allowed to stay in the U.S. while they await court hearings. These children are transferred to the custody of U.S. Health and Human Services’ Office of Refugee Resettlement who are tasked with finding and vetting sponsors for the children to live with — often family members in the U.S.
“If deported back to their home countries, these children risk being separated from parents, abused, and killed by gangs, and if they were deported to another country, they would certainly be vulnerable to trafficking, abuse and worse,” Galli said
Different procedures generally apply for children from Mexico and Canada because of the country’s proximity to the U.S.
Not exempting unaccompanied minors from border policies can lead to legal battles
Policy exceptions for unaccompanied minors can also protect the administration from lawsuits, Galli said, though it doesn’t make the government immune from legal challenges, Galli said. (On June 12, the ACLU and other advocacy groups sued the Biden administration over its new policy. The suit did not have to do with exceptions for unaccompanied minors. The ACLU argues the policy violates U.S. asylum law.)
In March 2020, Trump implemented a public health policy to quickly expel people crossing the border illegally. The order didn’t include an exemption for unaccompanied minors. The ACLU and other groups sued the administration, saying in part that the move violated the Trafficking Victims Protection Reauthorization Act. In November 2020, a district court blocked Trump from expelling unaccompanied minors.
Around 16,000 unaccompanied minors were expelled out of the U.S. under the policy from March 2020 to November 2020, said KFF, a health policy research organization.
Like Biden, Trump also implemented border policies that exempted unaccompanied minors. For example, the “Remain in Mexico” program required migrants to await their asylum court proceedings in Mexico.
Our ruling
Trump said Biden’s immigration order limiting asylum is “pro-child trafficking.”
The order’s exemption for unaccompanied minors is not evidence that the order is “pro-child trafficking,” legal experts said.
The exception follows federal laws to protect children from trafficking. The experts said not having the exception would endanger minors and make them more susceptible to trafficking. They pointed out that Trump’s own immigration policies also included the exception.
We rate Trump’s claim False.
For help related to a case of human trafficking, the National Human Trafficking Hotline is available at 1-888-373-7888 or by email at [email protected]. U.S. Immigrations and Customs Enforcement’s suspicious activity tip line is 1-866-DHS-2-ICE.
Coca-Cola only sold 25 bottles in its first year of production.
Rating:
An X post from user @historyinmemes on June 12, 2024, amassed over 17,000 likes and 1,600 reposts with an astonishing claim: “Coca-Cola sold only 25 bottles in its first year of operation.” Similarposts followed suit.
One X user shared a similar motivational message stating, “Coca-Cola only sold nine bottles of Coke in their first year of operation in 1886. Please fact-check. Today, they sell 2 billion bottles and cans every day.”
In response to @historyinmemes’ post, another user shared, “Coca-Cola sold only 9 bottles per day in its first year. Now, more than 1 billion are sold in a single day.”
As it turns out, all of the claims are false.
According to the Coca-Cola company’s website, under the “History” section, a pop-up “The Origin of Coca-Cola” states:
“On May 8, 1886, Dr. John Pemberton brought his perfected syrup to Jacobs’ Pharmacy in downtown Atlanta where the first glass of Coca‑Cola was poured. Serving about nine drinks per day in its first year, Coca‑Cola was an exciting new drink in the beginning.”
That means the company sold nine soda fountain drinks per day in its first year of operation, which was 1886. The Coca-Cola company didn’t sell its first bottle until 1894, eight years after the first fountain drink was sold in Atlanta. According to a 2023 article on the company’s website, “The Asa Candler Era,” Joseph A. Biedenharm was the first to bottle the drink.
“In 1894, in Vicksburg, Mississippi, Joseph A. Biedenharn was so impressed by the growing demand for Coca‑Cola at his soda fountain that he installed bottling machinery in the rear of his store and began to sell cases of Coca‑Cola to farms and lumber camps up and down the Mississippi River. He was the first bottler of Coca‑Cola.”
The Coca-Cola business boasts humble beginnings, which is surprising when you consider how profitable the company is now. Its website reports, “More than 1.9 billion servings of our drinks are enjoyed in more than 200 countries each day.” Considering the company started out selling a modest nine servings per day for only five cents per drink, its growth to date is pretty astounding.
In an article by Michael Brooks for Hackernoo.com:
“So, let’s do some quick math. The first year, 365 days, with “modest” nine servings a day for not only a new product, but also for a new concept. That’s 3,285 servings during the first business year. Five cents per serving (glass) should give us $164.25. Based on the inflation calculator, one dollar in 1886 should be worth $29.18 today. Not even five gees, gee.”
No matter how seemingly motivating the viral claims are, to state that Coca-Cola sold 25 (or nine) bottles in its first year is incorrect. In its first year, 1886, the company sold nine servings from a soda fountain per day. It didn’t start selling bottles until 1894, when the first bottled Coca-Cola hit the markets.
For this reason, we have labeled the claim, “False.”
(Google Patents)
(Goodreads)
(Hive)
Pink River Dolphin or Boto (Inia geoffrensis) (Getty Images)
(The Guardian)
