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
FALSE
Claim by Donald Trump (R): In April, “border crossings were up 1,000% compared to the same month last year. … Last year, it was 1,000% compared to the year before.”
FactCheck.org rating: False (Apprehensions, which are a proxy for illegal crossings, were down by 30%.)
Claim by Doug Burgum (R): Donald Trump “shut down” Nord Stream 2 pipeline, Joe Biden approved it, then Biden shut down U.S. liquified natural gas export capacity.
Politifact rating: Mostly False (More than 90% of Nord Stream 2 was built under Donald Trump’s watch. With pipeline construction nearly finished, President Biden waved sanctions to repair U.S. relations with Germany. The U.S. has become the top exporter of liquified natural gas under Biden.
Claim via Social Media: Video from June 2024 shows fence around U.S. Supreme Court building.
USA Today rating: False (The video is from 2022 and shows the fence constructed in response to protests of the court’s leaked draft opinion to overturn Roe v. Wade.)
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A viral image authentically shows the eyes of an electrician after he was accidentally shocked with 14,000 volts of electricity.
Rating:
A shocking image was posted on X by user @creepydotorg on Aug.10, 2023. It consisted of a pair of photos deemed to show the eyes of an electrician who was shocked with 14,000 volts of electricity after his shoulder touched a live wire. The caption on the post states:
The eyes of an electrician after being zapped by 14,000 volts of electricity. His shoulder touched a live wire and the current passed through his entire body, including the optic nerve, which connects the eye to the brain. The effect was two bizarre star-shaped electrical burns in his eyes.
The image is authentic.It originated with a scientific article published in the New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM) on Jan. 23, 2014. It was written by Dr. Bobby S. Korn and Dr. Don O. Kikkawa, both ophthalmologists and professors at the University of California, San Diego. Korn treated the patient whose eyes were featured in the image. The article’s abstract reads:
A 42-year-old male electrician presented to the eye clinic with decreasing vision 4 weeks after an electrical burn of 14,000 V to the left shoulder. His vision in both eyes was limited to perception of hand motions, with an intraocular pressure of 14 mm Hg in each eye.
The authors wrote that after four months, the patient underwent cataract extraction and implantation of a special lens, which resulted in some visual improvement. Two years after the operation, the electrician suffered retinal detachment in his left eye, which was operated on to repair. Korn told Live Sciencethat at a 10-year follow-up visit, the patient could only count fingers with his left eye. He was able to read using low-light aids and independently use public transportation, although he was legally blind.
“The optic nerve is similar to any wire that conducts electricity, Korn said. “In this case, the extreme current and voltage that passed through this important natural wire caused damage to the optic nerve itself.”
Korn was referencing the optic nerve that was damaged from the shock to the man’s left shoulder, as described in the NEJM article. The information in the X post is corroborated by the NEJM article. The viral image appears to be an exact match, albeit cropped, for the one published in that article. The cropped version was featured in the Live Science article, where the X user likely found the image.
For these reasons, we have labeled the claim “True.”
James Baldwin said, “We can disagree and still love each other unless your disagreement is rooted in my oppression and denial of my humanity and right to exist.”
Rating:
Context
It wasn’t James Baldwin who said this, but essayist and novelist Robert Jones Jr., who used to write online under the moniker @sonofbaldwin. He wrote and posted these words on X (formerly Twitter) on Aug. 18, 2015.
For years, social media users and article writers have shared a quoted they have attributed to gay Black author James Baldwin:
“We can disagree and still love each other unless your disagreement is rooted in my oppression and denial of my humanity and right to exist.” — James Baldwin
Besides spreading on Reddit, Threads and X, the quote has appeared on the social media platform where people share the books they read, Goodreads, as well as in articles and blog posts. This quote only started to spread in the second half of the 2010s, however, and searches for Baldwin’s writing reveal no such quote.
That is because in reality, author Robert Jones Jr. — who, like Baldwin, is Black and gay — is the one who wrote and posted these words on Aug. 18, 2015, on his now-defunct X account (formerly Twitter), @sonofbaldwin. He preserved a screenshot of his tweet, which is now saved on his website, sonofbaldwin.com:
(screen capture)
Jones wrote and curated the blog Son of Baldwin for years, before publishing his first novel, “The Prophets,” about two enslaved Black men in the 19th-century U.S. South who fell in love. He followed in Baldwin’s footsteps in several ways, including by continuing to explore society from the point of view of a Black queer man and by approaching his topics with lucid sincerity.
We have written about other Baldwin’s quotes in April and May 2024.
Sources
‘Robert Jones, Jr.’ Robert Jones, Jr., https://www.sonofbaldwin.com/. Accessed 14 June 2024.
‘The Prophets by Robert Jones, Jr.: 9780593085691 | PenguinRandomHouse.Com: Books’. PenguinRandomhouse.Com, https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/622773/the-prophets-by-robert-jones-jr/. Accessed 14 June 2024.
‘TruthSayers: Robert Jones Jr. – Creator of Son of Baldwin – AWAACC’. The August Wilson African American Cultural Center, https://awaacc.org/event/truthsayers-robert-jones-jr-creator-of-son-of-baldwin/. Accessed 14 June 2024.
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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In a June 15 speech at “The People’s Convention” in Detroit, Trump said, “Joe Biden is out the other day trying to claim that crime is down. But actually, crime is way up. They don’t report crime properly anymore, as you probably have heard. Crooked Joe is citing statistics that no longer include data from 30% of the country, including the biggest and most violent cities.”
Asked for evidence of Trump’s missing 30% claim, Republican National Committee spokesperson Anna Kelly did not directly address the statistic, saying instead that “in most cities, homicide rates remain higher than pre-pandemic levels” and that “63% of Americans believe that crime is a serious issue.”
Trump’s comments follow the FBI’s June 10 release of preliminary data showing that during the first three months of 2024, violent crime fell 15.2% compared with the same period in 2023. Within that category, murders declined 26.4%, reported rapes decreased 25.7%, aggravated assaults declined by 12.5% and robberies fell 17.8%.
The report followed other data releases showing crime’s downward trend. An independent analysis by crime data analysis company AH Datalytics projected that murders will have dropped by 10% between 2022 — the last year for which full FBI data is available — and 2023. The company projected an additional 18% decline by the end of 2024, based on current trends.
Trump’s point echoed claims by alliesonsocial media that FBI crime statistics are meaningless because many police departments, including those in New York and Los Angeles, did not submit data, leaving their crimes uncounted.
However, experts in crime statistics say that such claims are wrong on several levels.
Although the FBI did finalize a methodological change in 2021 that left that year’s data with an unusually wide margin of uncertainty, those problems were fixed beginning in 2022.
In addition, the FBI estimates crime patterns for any missing cities using data from cities of similar size — and it did that in 2021 as well; no city was truly “missing” from the data. Finally, the general patterns for the FBI’s 2021 figures align with data that has been collected independently of the FBI.
This argument is a “convenient boogeyman, but it’s not an accurate one,” said Jeff Asher, co-founder of AH Datalytics.
What happened in 2021?
The FBI changed the way police departments report crime, requiring that they shift to the new National Incident-Based Reporting System for 2021 data collection.
When the 2021 data-collection process was complete, the information submitted to the FBI reflected data covering about 65% of the nation’s population. This meant that about 35% of the population was not covered that year, including such major cities as New York City and Los Angeles.
To make up for the absence of that 35%, the FBI followed its standard procedure: It replaced the missing data with estimates, using data from comparable cities. This estimation made the 2021 data as complete as it could be under the circumstances, but experts caution that was not an ideal fix.
In a typical year, the FBI collects between 90% and 99% of the data it needs, Asher said. So most of the time, estimating the missing data “isn’t a big deal. But with the coverage suddenly dropping to 65%,” he said, “it mattered in 2021.”
For 2021, the range of uncertainty — essentially the margin of error — for the murder rate was -7% to +17%, and for violent crime overall, it was between -12% and +11%, Asher said. That compares to close to zero uncertainty for a typical year other than 2021.
As a result, Asher and other crime statistics experts caution against reading too much into the 2021 data.
“It’s true that the 2021 numbers were particularly underwhelming because of the low response rate,” agreed James Alan Fox, a Northeastern University criminologist.
What’s happened since 2021
The issue of data being compromised due to low response rates as it was in 2021 hasn’t occurred since.
For the 2022 data — the last full year of FBI data released — the agency allowed police departments to report either using the new or old system for filing data. That got coverage rates back up to about 94% of the nation’s population, in line with all recent years other than 2021. And the indications for 2023 and 2024 look like the coverage rates for those years will be similarly high as well, experts said.
So the problems that hampered the FBI data in 2021 is a one-time issue that hasn’t been repeated.
New York and Los Angeles were among cities that submitted data in 2022, he said. For 2023, New York submitted data using the new National Incident-Based Reporting System and Los Angeles is expected to submit through the old system as it continues to transition its processes.
Even if New York hadn’t been reflected in FBI data, Trump would be wrong to lump it in with the nation’s “most violent cities,” said Ernesto Lopez, a research specialist with the Council on Criminal Justice. New York “tends to have a lower homicide rate compared to other major cities, so that is not likely an issue,” Lopez said.
The FBI reports “have always been incomplete” to some degree, “but that does not mean they are misleading as to trends,” added Candace McCoy, a professor emerita at John Jay College of the City University of New York. The FBI report, she said, remains “the best measure available of crime nationwide.”
In addition, the FBI data’s trend lines have generally tracked the patterns in data compiled by other groups — groups that were not affected by the FBI’s methodological switch. “There are lots of data sources telling the same story about what is happening with murder and violent crime,” Asher wrote. These include Asher’s own murder dashboard as well as violent crime calculations by the Major Cities Chiefs Association and the Council on Criminal Justice. All use data collected directly by each group from a range of police departments.
Our ruling
Trump said that crime statistics “no longer include data from 30% of the country including the biggest and most violent cities.”
This was never quite accurate, but it’s been wrong since 2022 and going forward.
In 2021, the FBI required police departments to report data using a new system. That year, data for about 65% of the U.S. population was covered in the FBI’s annual report, rather than the typical 95%. This technically omitted roughly 35% of the U.S. population. However, as is standard FBI policy, the missing data was estimated using comparable jurisdictions.
More to the point, the FBI’s 2022 data coverage returned to 94% of the population, which is in line with other years excluding 2021, and preliminary numbers for 2023 and 2024 indicate that the coverage level should continue.
In addition, the FBI data’s trend lines have generally tracked the patterns in data compiled by other groups — groups that were not affected by the FBI’s methodological switch.
After an appeals court ruled in favor of Los Angeles school employees who opposed COVID-19 vaccination mandates, independent presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr., celebrated on social media.
“The ranks of the conspiracy theorists now include the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, which just ruled Covid vax mandates unconstitutional because the vaccine does not stop transmission,” Kennedy wrote in a June 12 Facebook post. “I dunno, maybe it’s the brain worm, but I seem to remember the experts and authorities telling us otherwise.”
The 9th Circuit Court of Appeals on June 7 ruled only that the lawsuit filed against the Los Angeles Unified School District could move forward. It overturned a lower court decision to dismiss the lawsuit, which was brought by the nonprofit Health Freedom Defense Fund, which advocates against vaccine mandates, and employees who opposed the district’s COVID-19 vaccination mandate.
“The court did not rule on the legitimacy or accuracy of the plaintiffs’ factual allegations about the vaccines, such as their claims that the vaccines do not prevent transmission,” said Stacey B. Lee, a law and ethics professor at the Johns Hopkins Carey Business School.
Both Lee and Dorit Reiss, an expert on vaccine policy at University of California Law, San Francisco, told PolitiFact that the court didn’t directly address the constitutionality of vaccine mandates.
“The question before the court was whether the district court was right to dismiss the case without letting it go to fact finding,” Reiss said.
That question had two main parts: Did the school district’s decision to revoke the mandate render the case moot? And did the lower court correctly apply a U.S. Supreme Court precedent related to vaccine requirements?
“We vacate the district court’s order dismissing this claim and remand for further proceedings under the correct legal standard,” Judge Ryan Nelson wrote in the court’s 2-1 decision.
We contacted Kennedy and received no response.
(Screenshot from Facebook.)
The school district’s vaccine mandate
In 2021, the Los Angeles Unified School District announced — andrepeatedlyamended — policies that required employees be vaccinated against COVID-19 or risk losing their jobs.
Vaccine mandate-opposed employees and the Health Freedom Defense Fund argued in their lawsuit that the policy violated their right to refuse medical treatment. The U.S. Supreme Court has ruled that the Constitution’s due process clause protects a person’s right to refuse medical care.
Appealing that decision, the plaintiffs asked the courts to declare the vaccination requirements unconstitutional and to prevent the district from requiring it in the future, according to the 9th Circuit opinion.
The school district dropped its vaccination policyin September 2023. Administrators said the district weighed factors including the slower and more predictable spread of the virus and the availability of COVID-19 treatments, LAist reported.
Oral arguments before the 9th Circuit took place Sept. 14, 2023, not long before the district’s school board voted to rescind the policy, according to the 9th Circuit opinion.
Nelson wrote that the school district had “reversed course several times” on its policy.
“LAUSD’s pattern of withdrawing and then reinstating its vaccination policies is enough to keep this case alive,” the 9th Circuit opinion said.
The appeals court said a Supreme Court precedent was incorrectly applied
In dismissing the lawsuit, the lower court had relied in part on the Supreme Court’s 1905 ruling in Jacobson v. Massachusetts, which the defense had argued supported the vaccine mandate’s constitutionality. That Jacobson decision established that a smallpox vaccination requirement was constitutional, saying states can implement “reasonable regulations” to protect public health and safety.
The 9th Circuit ruling said the lower court’s application of the Jacobson precedent in the Los Angeles case was flawed.
The plaintiffs in the Los Angeles Unified School District case had argued that COVID-19 vaccines do not effectively prevent the spread of the virus and only mitigate symptoms for vaccine recipients. They argued COVID-19 vaccines are “a medical treatment, not a ‘traditional’ vaccine,” according to the 9th Circuit opinion.
The appeals court ruled that the Jacobson standard would not apply if the plaintiffs’ anti-vaccine arguments were factually true — something the court noted had not been fully examined or factually established at this stage of the court proceedings.
“On a motion to dismiss, the court is compelled to take the plaintiffs’ allegations as true,” said Margaret Foster Riley, a law and public health sciences professor at the University of Virginia’s School of Law. “It is not meant to evaluate those claims, but rather to determine whether the plaintiff has a legally viable case assuming everything that they allege is true.”
By allowing the case to continue, the plaintiffs now have the task of arguing the veracity of their COVID-19 vaccine claims. The defense, if it wants to use Jacobson as grounds for dismissal, has the task of submitting evidence to rebut the plaintiffs’ claims that vaccines don’t effectively prevent the virus’ spread.
Alternatively, the school district could appeal and either request a larger bench of 9th Circuit judges hear their arguments for dismissal or appeal directly to the U.S. Supreme Court.
“It’s crucial to note the court did not endorse the plaintiffs’ claims about the vaccines,” Lee said. The court found that “Jacobson alone would not definitively resolve the case at the outset,” if the plaintiffs’ allegations about the vaccines proved true.
The ruling said the appeals court’s findings on the application of Jacobson were preliminary. “We do not prejudge whether, on a more developed factual record, Plaintiffs’ allegations will prove true,” it read.
Our ruling
Kennedy claimed the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals “just ruled Covid vax mandates unconstitutional.”
The 9th Circuit Court of Appeals ruled 2-1 to vacate a lower court’s dismissal of the vaccine mandate lawsuit; it did not rule on whether a vaccine mandate is constitutional.
We rate this claim False.
PolitiFact Researcher Caryn Baird contributed to this report.
Tom Selleck said, “I refuse to debate gun control with anyone who believes men can have babies.”
Rating:
On June 17, 2024, a user on X named @TRUMP_ARMY_ posted (archive) a purported quote from “Blue Bloods” actor Tom Selleck. According to the post, Selleck recently said, “I refuse to debate gun control with anyone who believes men can have babies.” As of this writing, the post received more than 4,000 replies, 11,000 reposts and 108,000 likes.
One user replied to the post, writing “That mustache is biblical and has spoken. I agree with it.”
Another user referenced Selleck’s long-running TV series, posting, “Tom Selleck is a great PATRIOT, and a great ACTOR! ‘Blue Bloods’ is my favorite series – the best!”
X user Pamela Hensley (@PamelaHensley22) appeared to publish the first publicly-available post (archive) containing the quote alongside Selleck’s photo and name, on May 2, 2024.
No Evidence Selleck Said the Quote
However, not even one shred of evidence exists to confirm the quote originated with Selleck. In other words, the user @TRUMP_ARMY_ and other online users all misattributed the quote to the actor.
A Google search for the quote about debating gun control and men having babies displayed only seven results. Those results included links to iFunny.co and otherposts on X.
Had Selleck made the remark about guns and the subject of transgender identity — or any similar comments referencing people who identify as LGTBQ+ — numerous entertainment and political news outlets would have reported on the matter. We found no such articles.
Snopes reached out to a representative for Selleck to ask about the fake quote. We also sent messages on X to both @TRUMP_ARMY_ and Hensley asking about why they would post fake quotes to their followers. We will update this story if they respond.
The Original Selleck Quote Post
A user replying to Hensley’s May post asked, “Did he, or are you just lying for engagement?” The user then jokingly posted fthat ormer U.S. President Abraham Lincoln said, “Don’t believe the grifters’ lies.”
For further reading, in 1999, the Tampa Bay Times reported about Selleck’s infamous on-air debate with Rosie O’Donnell about guns and the Second Amendment.
A federal appeals court has revived a lawsuit against the Los Angeles Unified School District for its now-rescinded COVID-19 vaccine requirement. The court said the case should be allowed to develop beyond the preliminary arguments. But anti-vaccination activists have twisted the opinion to falsely claim the court had “declared that the mRNA covid jab is NOT a vaccine.”
Full Story
The Los Angeles Unified School District was among the employers that mandated COVID-19 vaccination in 2021, and then faced lawsuits over its requirement.
The first suit, filed on March 17, 2021, was brought by employees who didn’t want to get vaccinated. It was dismissed four months later because the school district had amended its policy to allow workers to instead submit to regular testing. (The district later reinstituted the vaccine requirement without the testing option, and then did away with the mandate altogether in September.)
A second suit was brought in November 2021 on behalf of the district employees by an Idaho-based nonprofit that started in 2020 and has pursued several lawsuits directed at public health measures meant to curb the spread of COVID-19, including mask and vaccine mandates.
The nonprofit organization, called the Health Freedom Defense Fund, argued that COVID-19 vaccines are not actually vaccines, but are instead “medical treatments,” and cannot be mandated. The group argued that the COVID-19 vaccines don’t prevent transmission of the disease, but rather just reduce its severity in those who are infected – making “the injection … a treatment, not a vaccine.”
As we’ve explainedbefore, since the virus changes as it spreads, the vaccines have become less effective in providing protection against symptomatic illness, but it is effective in preventing severe disease and death from COVID-19.
A study from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention published in February found that, for adults, the most recent formulation of the vaccines provided 54% increased protection against symptomatic infection. Expertssay that those vaccines should also be effective in preventing severe disease and death from the most common variants circulating since 2023.
Although the legal fight against the LA school district has been going on for about three years, it’s still in a relatively early legal stage, since both cases have been dismissed by trial courts. The Health Freedom Defense Fund suit was dismissed for several reasons in 2022, most importantly because the court found that the vaccine’s ability to reduce the severity of disease and death from COVID-19 met the district’s interest in protecting the health of students and employees.
However, on June 7, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit reversed that dismissal and sent the case back to the trial court to flesh out the arguments on both sides.
But conspiracy theorists and anti-vaccinationinfluencers on social media have misrepresented the opinion from the appeals court to falsely claim that it had “declared that the mRNA covid jab is NOT a vaccine.”
The court did no such thing.
Rather, the three-judge panel ruled 2-1 that the lower court was wrong to dismiss the case and that the school district’s “pattern of withdrawing and then reinstating its vaccination policies was enough to keep this case alive.”
As we said, the case is still in the early stages and neither side has presented much beyond their initial arguments. The appeals court wrote, “At this stage, we must accept Plaintiffs’ allegations that the vaccine does not prevent the spread of COVID-19 as true.” Letting the case continue will allow for each side to present evidence to support their arguments about the effectiveness of the vaccines.
“We note the preliminary nature of our holding,” the court said. “We do not prejudge whether, on a more developed factual record, Plaintiffs’ allegations will prove true.”
So, the court found that the case should continue. It has not “declared” whether or not the COVID-19 vaccines are actually vaccines.
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.
California Educators for Medical Freedom v. Los Angeles Unified School District. No. 21-cv-02388. U.S. District Court for the Central District of California. Complaint. 17 Mar 2021.
Health Freedom Defense Fund v. Megan K. Reilly. No. 2:21-cv-08688. U.S. District Court for the Central District of California. Complaint. 3 Nov 2021.
California Educators for Medical Freedom v. Los Angeles Unified School District. No. 21-cv-02388. U.S. District Court for the Central District of California. Order grants defendants’ motion to dismiss. 27 Jul 2021.
CNN on June 15 released rules that President Joe Biden and former President Donald Trump have agreed to abide by during their anticipated June 27 debate.
Not included in the list was one that some social media users had been sharing before the final terms were made public.
“Breaking: The Biden campaign has demanded that Joe Biden not have to stand during the presidential debate,” the claim in a June 14 Instagram post said. The post was a screenshot of a June 12 X post by Philip Anderson, a Texas man who has pleaded not guilty to charges stemming from his actions on Jan. 6, 2021, at the U.S. Capitol.
We saw similar claims on X, citing unnamed sources.
The Instagram 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, Threads, and Instagram.)
Trump, the presumptive Republican presidential candidate, in May said that he had been asked about a seated debate.
CNN spokesperson Dylan Rose Geerlings told PolitiFact in a statement that the viral claim about Biden’s team asking for a seated debate is false. “It’s not accurate… CNN’s proposed format was to have both candidates stand and both sides agreed to the rules when they agreed to debate.”
CNN anchors Jake Tapper, left, and Dana Bash, right, will moderate the June 27 debate in Atlanta. (AP)
According to CNN, Biden and Trump have also agreed to: no studio audience other than campaign staffers; no stage props or pre-written notes; having their microphones muted by the network when the other candidate is speaking. A coin toss will decide where their podiums are positioned and campaign staffers will not be allowed to interact with the candidates during breaks, the network said.
We rate the claim that the Biden campaign asked not to stand during debate False.
PolitiFact Researcher Caryn Baird contributed to this report.
According to Social Media Today, YouTube has announced a new feature allowing users to add contextual notes to videos, akin to X’s (formerly Twitter) Community Notes. This feature, initially available on mobile in the U.S. in English, aims to provide relevant and easy-to-understand context.
According to YouTube, notes will be visible if deemed broadly helpful. Users can rate notes as “helpful,” “somewhat helpful,” or “unhelpful” and explain their reasoning, such as citing high-quality sources or clarity. A bridging-based algorithm will use these ratings to decide which notes are published.
Originally called “Birdwatch,” Community Notes on X became a tool under Elon Musk to reduce the need for paid moderation by allowing users to determine the content’s veracity. While YouTube does not plan to rely solely on community notes, it views this feature as a supplementary element to enhance the context of certain clips.
YouTube acknowledges potential errors during the pilot phase but invites feedback to refine the system.
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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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The color red triggers bulls, which is why they charge at a matador’s red flag (muleta) in a bullfight.
Rating:
The idiom “red rag to a bull” means to aggravate someone, make them angry, or incite violence. The phrase “seeing red” implies blind rage. Both phrases may be traced to the Spanish tradition of bullfighting, in which the bullfighter (matador) performs a kind of dance with the bull before killing it with the use of a red flag (muleta) and a sword. It’s a logical enough connection to make: The matador waves the muleta, the bull charges horns-first.
However, many on the internet have raised questions about the apparent correlation: “Is it the red color of the muleta that causes the bull to charge? Or is it simply the movement of the muleta and the present threat of the bullfighter in the arena? And if so, why is the muleta red?”
We looked into the claim, and learned that bulls are not triggered by the color red.
First, bulls are partially colorblind, though not fully color blind. Like all cattle (and most mammals), they are dichromatic, meaning that they can only see two main color types. Unlike humans, they do not possess red retina receptors and can see only in shades of “yellowish-green” and “bluish-purple” light, according to the book “Improving Animal Welfare: A Practical Approach” by Temple Grandin.
(SR Publications)
Matadors only use the red muleta in the third and final stage of the traditional bull fight. They use a magenta and yellow cape (capote) during the first stages of the fight.
So, if bulls can’t see red the way humans do, why do they charge at the red muleta?
In 2007, the Discovery Channel series “MythBusters” aired an episode titled “Red Rag to a Bull” in which they ran bulls through five tests to determine what causes bulls to charge.
They first put a static flag – one white, one blue, one red – in the arena, one at a time. When they released the bull, it charged at all three separate flags, regardless of the color.
They then put all three static flags in the arena at once, and again, the bull charged each of the flags, regardless of the color.
Next, using a remote controlled zip-line system, they compared how the bull reacted to a moving flag. While a red flag hung static in the arena, the MythBusters moved the blue flag across the zip-line. The bull chased after the blue flag, completely ignoring the static red flag.
They then tested each flag held by a human form. The MythBusters placed three foam dummies wearing red, white, or blue with mechanized arms waving a corresponding red, white, or blue flag in the arena. The bull first charged the white dummy, then the blue dummy, and finally, the red dummy.
Lastly, one MythBuster dressed all in red stood motionless in the arena while two professional bullfighters ran around the arena. When they released the bull, it exclusively charged the professional bullfighters, ignoring the motionless person dressed in red.
The experiment’s finding confirmed that movement is what primarily triggers bulls, not color.
Another factor is that bulls have a “flight or fight” response when the matador invades their personal space. According to the International Longhorn Association, bulls will attempt to remove themselves (flight) – or remove the threat (fight) – until the invasion is no longer considered a threat. In the context of understanding how to control cattle, the International Longhorn Association says that:
Understanding the “flight zone,” defined as a cattle’s personal space, is the key to easy and quiet handling. Simply put, when you penetrate the flight zone, the animal moves. When you retreat from the flight zone, the animal stops. The flight zone factor is shared by all species of animals, including humans. When someone, or something, invades our personal space, we attempt to remove ourselves until the invasion is no longer considered a threat. The size of the flight zone is determined by many factors in cattle: the temperament of the animals to begin with, the conditions (corral, pasture), the disposition and number of handlers, etc. just to name a few.
So, if movement and the matador’s encroachment on its personal space is what triggers bulls, as opposed to the color red, why are muletas traditionally red?
Many claim that muletas are red in order to mask the blood spilled when the matador kills the bull by driving a sword between its shoulder blades, with the intent of piercing the heart or aorta.
However, we did not find definitive evidence that muletas are red to mask the bull’s blood. The muleta is traditionally red; the use of both the capote and the muleta are culturally significant to the practice of bullfighting going back centuries. According to Madrid Bullfighting:
The capote and the muleta are not just tools used by the matador; they are also symbols of the bullfighting tradition in Madrid. The bright colors and intricate designs of the capote and the muleta are instantly recognizable and are an important part of the spectacle of the bullfight.
We should note that in the first two-thirds of the bullfighting performance, when the matador uses the magenta-and-yellow capote, he, along with the picador on horseback and three banderilleros, do draw the bull’s blood prior to the final third. The picador stabs the bull first with the intention of weakening its neck and shoulder muscles. The banderilleros stab the bull in its shoulders next, using two banderillas, or sharp barbed sticks. Both of these stabbings occur prior to the final third, when the matador (literally meaning “killer”) uses the red muleta and delivers the final sword thrust, which undoubtedly draws more blood than that drawn by the picador and banderilleros.
We reached out to multiple historians and scholars of Spanish history and bullfighting inquiring why muletas are red, and will update this story if we receive a response.
In sum, the color red, specifically, does not trigger bulls. Rather, movement and the threat of the matador’s presence sends bulls into a fight-or-flight response, causing them to attack.
Sources
Be like a Red Rag to a Bull. 12 June 2024, https://dictionary.cambridge.org/us/dictionary/english/be-like-a-red-rag-to-a-bull.
Is Red the True Reason Bulls Become Angry in a Bullfight? https://news.cgtn.com/news/2019-10-23/Is-red-the-true-reason-bulls-become-angry-in-a-bullfight–L1bLt2SyvC/index.html#:~:text=a%20red%20muleta.%20/-,VCG%20Photo,(Cover%20image%20via%20VCG). Accessed 13 June 2024.
ITLA – Longhorn_Information – Handling. 11 May 2010, https://web.archive.org/web/20100511090201/http://www.itla.net/index.cfm?sec=Longhorn_Information&con=handling.
Publications, S. R. ‘EXPERIENCE COW VISION!’ SR Publications, 28 July 2023, https://www.srpublication.com/experience-cow-vision/.
See Red – Meaning & Origin Of The Phrase. 11 Dec. 2023, https://www.phrases.org.uk/meanings/see-red.html.
The Importance of the Capote and the Muleta in Madrid Bullfighting – Madrid Bullfighting. https://madridbullfighting.com/blog/the-importance-of-the-capote-and-the-muleta-in-madrid-bullfighting/. Accessed 13 June 2024.
Watch MythBusters Season 5 | Prime Video. https://www.amazon.com/gp/video/detail/B001PNZDLW/ref=atv_dp_sign_suc_3P?tag=Tyche-2669-20. Accessed 13 June 2024.
A photo taken inside an historically Black church in Michigan authentically shows the audience at a “Black Americans for Trump” event in June 2024.
Rating:
In mid-June 2024, a photo purportedly taken at a Black church in Michigan, as part of an event with signs that read “Black Americans for Trump,” went viral on several social media platforms, thanks in part to the apparent lack of Black Americans in the audience:
The claims regarding the context behind this photo were true. Detroit Public Radio reporter Russ McNamara shot the photo at a Black church outside of Detroit, Michigan, at an event with signs displayed that read, “Black Americans for Trump.” McNamara shared the photo alongside other photos of the June 15, 2024, event on X:
The authenticity was further confirmed by pictures taken by other photographers showing the same crowd, like this photo by Scott Olson for Getty Images:
Another Olson photograph captured outside the church shows the aforementioned “Black Americans for Trump” sign:
As Newsweek reported, “critics accused Trump of filling the historically Black church with white supporters and even ‘staging’ the event to show a robust crowd.”
McNamara said on X that the event was attended “at best” by an equal number of Black and white people. “Of the 8 Black Trump voters I talked to,” he added, “just one was from Detroit and zero were congregants.” A wider view of the audience can be seen in video from the event:
Rev. Lorenzo Sewell, senior pastor of the 180 Church that hosted Trump’s event, described to the Detroit Free Press the sequence of events leading up to his church’s involvement:
“I thought I was being punked,” [Rev. Lorenzo] Sewell, senior pastor of 180 Church, told the Free Press on Friday. “I literally thought it was a joke.”
But after realizing the opportunity was real, Sewell decided to accept, seeing it as a chance to have the voices of marginalized Detroiters heard by a national campaign.
His nondenominational church is located on Detroit’s west side, near Grand River and Interstate 96, in a struggling area he said has high rates of mental illness, drug addiction and poverty.
Because the photos genuinely come from an event targeting “Black Americans for Trump” that was held at an historically black church on June 15, 2024, we rate the claim as “True.”
Is President Joe Biden’s sister married to the owner of Dominion Voting Systems? No, but a viral Instagram video proclaims otherwise.
“Dominion voting machines: Biden’s Sister Is Married To Stephen Owens, Who Owns Dominion Voting Systems,” text on the June 8 video said. “Does Anyone Else See This As a Huge Conflict Of Interest?”
The Instagram 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, Threads, and Instagram.)
Biden’s only sister, Valerie Biden Owens, is married to John “Jack” Owens, not Stephen Owens.
According to her website, Jack Owens is an attorney and businessman. The pair married on Oct. 11, 1975, at a church at the United Nations Plaza in New York, a New York Times wedding announcement says. Jack Owens and President Biden were classmates at the Syracuse University College of Law and both graduated in 1968.
Stephen Owens is the co-founder of Staple Street Capital, whose investments include Dominion Voting Systems. The voting company sells election hardware and software to state and local governments in the U.S. and Canada. After the 2020 elections, Dominion Voting Systems was the subject of misinformation by conservatives. In 2023, Dominion reached a $787 million settlement with Fox News over false election claims.
Stephen Owens and Jack Owens are not related.
Reuters, The Associated Press and USA Today have also debunked this claim. A spokesperson for Dominion Voting Systems referred PolitiFact to the Reuters story, which includes a Dominion representative saying that Stephen Owens and Jack Owens are not related.
We rate the claim that Joe Biden’s sister is married to Dominion Voting Systems’ owner False.
Social media users are claiming a Canadian cancer charity replaced reproductive anatomy terminology with gender-neutral language. But this misconstrues the organization’s guidance for treating transgender and nonbinary patients.
On June 7, the conservative X account Libs of TikTok posted, “UNREAL. In order to be ‘inclusive,’ the Canadian Cancer Society will no longer use the term ‘cervix’ and instead use the term ‘front hole.’”
Conservative commentator Tomi Lahren made a similar statement in a video shared June 17 on X: “I don’t know what’s dumber or more delusional, the fact that some are trying to make ‘front hole’ terminology a thing, or that a leading cancer charity, the Canadian Cancer Society, has apologized for not using it and instead referring to a woman’s cervix as a ‘cervix.’”
Lahren’s video showed a screenshot of a June 9 Daily Mail article headline that said, “Top cancer charity apologizes for using word ‘cervix’ instead of trans-friendly ‘front hole.’”
The Daily Mail article cites an archived page of the Canadian Cancer Society’s website that provides information for trans and nonbinary patients about getting screened for cervical cancer.
At the bottom of the archived page, under a section titled, “words matter,” the organization states, “We recognize that many trans men and non-binary people may have mixed feelings about or feel distanced from words like ‘cervix.’ You may prefer other words, such as ‘front hole.’ We recognize the limitations of the words we’ve used while also acknowledging the need for simplicity. Another reason we use words like ‘cervix’ is to normalize the reality that men can have these body parts too.”
The archived page did not say “cervix” would no longer be used. The Daily Mail story may have misconstrued the language about “limitations” as a statement of regret, but the organization was explaining why it uses the word “cervix.” The words “apology,” “apologize” and “sorry” are not mentioned on the webpage, which was archived April 4.
The page has since been updated and the “words matter” section was removed. The only mention of the term “front hole” appears under a question about whether trans men and nonbinary people assigned female at birth should get screened for cervical cancer.
The page recommends these individuals talk with their health care providers about screenings and says, “Anyone with a cervix can get cervical cancer. The cervix is at the top of the vagina. Some trans men may call the vagina the front hole.”
When PolitiFact contacted the Canadian Cancer Society, we were referred to the organization’s June 12 statement on cancer information it provides to the trans community.
“We support all people with all cancers in communities across the country, regardless of age, race, language, education, geography, socio-economic status, gender identity or sexual orientation,” the statement said. “We use medical terminology, while also providing cancer information using plain language and formats to meet people’s unique needs and help them navigate their questions about cancer risk.”
In 2023, PolitiFact checked False claims that health professionals were being “urged” to call vaginas “bonus holes” to avoid offending transgender or nonbinary patients.
Viral claims that the Canadian Cancer Society apologized and will “no longer use the term ‘cervix’ and instead use the term ‘front hole’” are based on an inaccurate interpretation of an archived webpage. The organization was explaining why it uses “cervix.” We rate the claim False.
Former President Donald Trump has made illegal immigration and its impact on the U.S. a focus of his campaign – but several of his talking points are wrong or misleading. Here’s what we found among his immigration claims at recent events in the electoral swing states of Arizona and Nevada.
Trump falsely said that a proclamation by President Joe Biden to limit asylum eligibility “establishes an annual minimum of approximately 2 million illegal alien border crossers.”
He distorted how a mobile app for asylum appointments operated, saying it allows “free entry to be released into the United States at the push of a button.” Applicants are screened, and appointments are limited.
Trump offered wildly exaggerated border crossing statistics. For instance, he said that in April, “border crossings were up 1,000% compared to the same month last year.” Apprehensions, which are a proxy for illegal crossings, were down by 30%.
He distorted reporting by the New York Times to misleadingly claim that “88,000” unaccompanied minors who came to the U.S. illegally and were processed by the Biden administration “are missing” and “many of those children are dead.”
Trump claimed that “more drugs are coming into our country right now than at any time in our history.” Federal data for drug seizures by weight are trending down under Biden. As a proxy for drug smuggling, that data suggest that fewer drugs, not more, are coming into the country. Fentanyl seizures, however, have increased significantly under both Trump and Biden.
Trump claimed that “300,000 people are dying a year” in the U.S. from drugs, and said the figure is “probably more than that.” A federal agency reported that there were 107,941 drug overdose deaths in 2022, and a Centers for Disease Control and Prevention researcher previously told us that any undercount “should be relatively small.”
He falsely claimed that “virtually 100% of the new jobs under Biden have also gone to illegal aliens.” Since Biden became president in January 2021, employment of U.S.-born workers has increased more than employment of foreign-born workers, which includes those in the U.S. legally.
Trump claimed that real, meaning inflation-adjusted, income and wages for the Black population are down 6% under Biden. But the most recent government data show real income is up for Black households, while real wages for full-time Black workers are down by less than what Trump said.
The former president claimed that illegal immigration under Biden had created “flat-out economic warfare” on Black and Hispanic Americans by “taking the jobs” of those workers, and he said unions were “being absolutely slaughtered.” Employment and union membership data show no evidence of that.
Trump first spoke at a June 6 town hall in Phoenix hosted by groups affiliated with Turning Point USA, a conservative nonprofit organization. Three days later, he spoke at a campaign rally in Las Vegas on June 9.
We’re focusing only on Trump’s immigration-related assertions in those speeches. In addition to the claims below, Trump repeated his unsubstantiated talking point that “the entire world is emptying their prisons and jails, insane asylums, and mental institutions” and sending those people to the U.S. He has provided no evidence for that explosive claim, as we’vewrittenseveraltimes.
Biden’s Immigration Proclamation
In his Phoenix remarks, Trump wrongly said that a recent Biden proclamation to limit asylum eligibility “establishes an annual minimum of approximately 2 million illegal alien border crossers,” and he further inaccurately claimed that those crossing the southern border illegally are “coming in totally unchecked, unvetted.”
Biden’s June 4 immigration proclamation limits asylum eligibility for those caught trying to cross the southern border illegally when the number of people apprehended reaches a daily average of 2,500 encounters or more for seven straight days. The new rules went into effect immediately, because apprehensions were already higher than that threshold.
As we’ve explained, the proclamation allows the Department of Homeland Security to deny asylum eligibility and remove migrants who are apprehended when the limits are in effect. There are exemptions, according to DHS — including unaccompanied children, victims of “a severe form of trafficking,” noncitizens with visas or other lawful means of entering the country, and noncitizens who enter at a legal port of entry using a DHS-approved process, such as the CBP One app (more on that later). There is also a broader exemption for people who “express a fear of return to their country or country of removal, a fear of persecution or torture, or an intention to apply for asylum” if they “establish a reasonable probability of persecution or torture in the country of removal.”
The restrictions will be lifted 14 days after the daily average of apprehensions drops to 1,500 encounters or less for seven consecutive days. But the daily monthly average hasn’t been that low since July 2020.
None of this calls for a minimum 2 million border crossers. Even if the 2,500 threshold is reached every day for a year, that totals under 1 million, and those apprehended are processed and screened, not simply allowed to come into the country no questions asked.
Trump’s claim is similar to his false claims about the bipartisan Senate immigration deal earlier this year, which would have restricted asylum eligibility when apprehensions reached 5,000 per day for a week. As Republican Sen. James Lankford, one of the architects of that failed legislation, said of the measure in February, “It’s not that the first 5,000 [migrants encountered at the border] are released, that’s ridiculous. The first 5,000 we detain, we screen and then we deport. … If we get above 5,000, we just detain and deport.”
The idea that migrants are “coming in totally unchecked, unvetted” — either before or after Biden’s proclamation — is also wrong. Immigration experts explained to us that those who are apprehended trying to cross illegally are interviewed, have criminal record checks and provide biometric data. Depending on their circumstances and asylum claims, migrants could be released with a notice to appear in immigration court, processed for expedited removal or asked if they want to be returned to Mexico.
At both his Phoenix and Las Vegas events, Trump repeated a false claim he has often made — that the U.S. “had the most secure border we’ve ever had” when he left office. “When I ran in 2016, I ran largely on the border. Border was really bad. I fixed it,” he said in Phoenix. Apprehensions on the southern border, figures used as a proxy for illegal immigration, went up under Trump by 14.7% in his last year compared with 2016.
CBP One Mobile App
The Biden administration has tried to steer those seeking asylum to an application method at legal ports of entry that requires people to sign up for a limited number of appointments through the CBP One mobile app. They are then screened at those appointments. Trump claimed that the app allows “free entry to be released into the United States at the push of a button. Pretty hard, you go like this, ‘Ding, I’m here.’ Congratulations. Welcome to America.”
That’s not how it works.
Trump also falsely said that Biden’s recent immigration proclamation “dramatically expands” the CBP One app, but it doesn’t. Appointments have been capped at 1,450 per day since last June. The Customs and Border Protection press office confirmed to us that there has been no change in the number of daily appointments available.
The CBP One app was launched in January 2023 to accept appointments for migrants who are in Mexico and want to request asylum or parole. DHS calls this “safer, humane, and more orderly” than processing between ports of entry, where migrants cross the border illegally and wait to be apprehended.
Migrants must submit information about themselves in order to get the appointment, including contact information and a photo. At the appointment, they are screened and could be subject to expedited removal, but the majority are released into the U.S. with a notice to appear in immigration court, Colleen Putzel-Kavanaugh, an associate policy analyst at the Migration Policy Institute, a nonpartisan think tank that researches immigration issues, told us when we wrote about immigration in February.
As of the end of April 2024, more than 591,000 people have made appointments with the app, CBP says.
Border Stats
Trump offered some wildly exaggerated statistics on illegal border crossings in his Phoenix remarks.
He claimed that 18 million people had been allowed into the U.S. under Biden. “I think that’s the real number as of now, 18 million people.” There’s no evidence for such a figure. We asked the Trump campaign about this claim, and others cited in this article, but we didn’t receive a response.
According to data from the Office of Homeland Security Statistics, there were 6.5 million apprehensions by Border Patrol of migrants trying to cross the southern border illegally from February 2021, the month after Biden took office, to February of this year. (The figure doesn’t correspond to that same number of people because of repeat crossing attempts by the same people. For example, the recidivism rate was 27% in fiscal year 2021, according to the most recent figures from CBP.)
Trump speaking at the “Chase the Vote” town hall at Dream City Church in Phoenix, Arizona, on June 6. Photo by Gage Skidmore.
Over that 2021-2024 time period, there were also 923,000 “inadmissibles” who arrived at legal ports of entry but didn’t have legal permission to enter the U.S. Of those 7.4 million total encounters at the border, 2.9 million were removed by CBP and 3.2 million were released with notices to appear in immigration court or report to Immigration and Customs Enforcement in the future, or other classifications, such as parole.
As we’ve explained before, there are also estimates for “gotaways,” or migrants who crossed the border illegally and evaded the authorities. Based on an average annual apprehension rate of 78%, which DHS provided to us, that would mean there were an estimated 1.8 million gotaways from February 2021 to February 2024.
The gotaways plus those released with court notices or other designations would total 5 million, a far cry from 18 million. There were also 407,500 transfers to HHS, which is responsible for children who cross the border on their own, unaccompanied by adult family members or legal guardians, and 883,000 transfers to Immigration and Customs Enforcement. ICE transfers include those who are then booked into ICE custody, enrolled in “alternatives to detention” (which include technological monitoring) or released by ICE. So, we don’t know how many of those were released into the country with a court notice. But even if we include those figures, it still doesn’t get us to anywhere near 18 million.
Also, these figures reflect what initially happens when migrants have come to the border. In many cases, the final decision on whether a migrant will be allowed to stay or will be deported comes later, particularly since there is a yearslong backlog of immigration court cases.
Trump also falsely claimed that in April, “border crossings were up 1,000% compared to the same month last year, 1,000% compared to last year. And by the way, last year, it was 1,000% compared to the year before.” In April, apprehensions of those trying to cross illegally were 30% lower than they were in April 2023. And the April 2023 figure was down 9.6% compared with the year before.
Migrant Minors
In February 2023, the New York Times reported that the Department of Health and Human Services was not able to get in contact with more than 85,000 children whom department officials had placed with relatives or other sponsors in the U.S. after the minors illegally came to the country unaccompanied in 2021 and 2022.
In Phoenix, Trump distorted those facts and claimed without any evidence that all of the children “are missing” and that “many” of them are now deceased.
“Because of Biden’s policies, millions and millions of children have been separated from their families and pushed into the hands of the coyotes and the cartels,” Trump said. “And, you know, 88,000, I don’t know if you — if it were me, it would be the biggest story — 88,000 children are missing. … 88,000 children are missing under this administration, and they have no idea. And unfortunately, many of those children are dead.”
That’s not what the Times reported. Its article said: “While H.H.S. checks on all minors by calling them a month after they begin living with their sponsors, data obtained by The Times showed that over the last two years, the agency could not reach more than 85,000 children. Overall, the agency lost immediate contact with a third of migrant children.”
The Office of Refugee Resettlement, the HHS agency that manages the program for unaccompanied children, says its “custodial relationship with the child terminates” once he or she is placed with a sponsor. However, before closing a case file, ORR says that 30 days after releasing the child, the office should make a “Safety and Well Being Follow Up Call” and document the results, including noting if the child or sponsor could not be reached “after reasonable efforts have been exhausted.”
But if a call goes unanswered or is not returned, that doesn’t necessarily mean the child is missing. The Times said it interviewed more than 100 minors who had been released from ORR custody. Many were working dangerous jobs “in violation of child labor laws.”
As for deaths, the Times said it “found a dozen cases of young migrant workers killed since 2017.” There was little information provided on when they died or who was president when they came to the U.S. Based on the details the Times provided for four deaths that were highlighted in its story, we were able to determine that two ofthe children died in work-related accidents during the Trump administration. And at least one of those two reportedly came to the U.S. during the Obama administration. The two other deaths highlighted in the Times story occurred, or likely occurred, during the Biden administration.
The Washington Post Fact Checker wrote about this claim, noting that HHS also couldn’t reach children under the Trump administration.
Drug Smuggling
Trump claimed that there has been a large increase in drugs coming into the U.S. because drug smugglers do not fear the Biden administration.
“More drugs are coming into our country right now than at any time in our history, times five or times six,” he said in Phoenix. “We’ve never had massive amounts of drugs pouring into our country. We fought it like hell.”
And in Las Vegas, he claimed that under Biden “now the drugs are pouring into our country.”
Comprehensive data on the total quantity of illicit drugs smuggled into the U.S. do not exist. But CBP does track the amount of drugs seized by border officials, most of which comes through legal ports of entry. Some use the seizure data as a proxy for how much enters the country undetected. When more drugs are seized, that is seen as an indication that more drugs are coming into the country.
Trump may have been referring only to fentanyl, a potent synthetic opioid that is lethal in small doses. He mentioned that drug in his remarks in Phoenix and Las Vegas.
The amount of fentanyl seized by border officials has increased by about 462% under Biden, going from almost 4,800 pounds seized in fiscal year 2020 to roughly 27,000 pounds in fiscal 2023. There were about 700 pounds of fentanyl seized in FY 2016, the last full fiscal cycle before Trump took office, so there was a 586% increase in seizures of that drug when he was president.
Overall, federal data show that the total amount of drugs seized nationwide has declined each fiscal year under Biden.
As we’ve written, there were nearly 1.1 million pounds of drugs seized by the Border Patrol and the Office of Field Operations in fiscal 2020, Trump’s last full fiscal cycle as president. That was an increase from the 901,000 pounds of drugs seized in fiscal 2019.
Under Biden, there were about 913,000 pounds of drugs seized in fiscal 2021, which is the highest total during his administration. The amount of drugs seized then declined to almost 656,000 pounds in fiscal 2022 and about 549,000 pounds in fiscal 2023.
As of April, more than 320,000 pounds of drugs had been seized through the first seven months of fiscal 2024. That’s more drugs seized than in the same period the prior year, but it’s still well below the totals interdicted during the end of Trump’s presidency.
Drug Overdoses
Trump again inflated the number of people dying each year in the U.S. from drug overdoses, claiming that such deaths are significantly underreported.
In Phoenix, he said: “300,000 people are dying a year. Those are the real numbers. They like to say 100[,000]. They like to say 90[,000]. It’s been that number for a long time. It’s 300,000 people, and it’s probably more than that, and we’re going to have to take very strong action because we can’t let that happen.”
Officially, there were 107,941 deaths from drug overdoses in 2022, up from 106,699 in 2021, according tothe most recent figures from the National Center for Health Statistics, a division of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The total did not top 90,000 deaths until 2020, during Trump’s administration.
When we fact-checked a similar Trump claim in March 2023, Christopher Ruhm, a professor of public policy and economics at the University of Virginia, told us that he had “not yet seen convincing evidence that the number of overall drug deaths is drastically underreported.” Ruhm wrote in a 2018 paper that incomplete death certificates previously led to drug deaths from opioids being “understated,” but in our interview with him he said that “undercount has fallen over time” because the reporting on death records improved.
Merianne Spencer, then a CDC researcher, also told us last year that there was no evidence hundreds of thousands of drug-related deaths were not being counted.
“While we believe that there could be an undercount due to some overdose deaths still pending investigation at the close of the mortality files at the end of each year, any undercount should be relatively small,” she said in an email.
Native- and Foreign-Born Employment
In Las Vegas, Trump falsely claimed that all of the jobs added in the U.S. during the Biden administration have been filled by people residing in the U.S. illegally.
“Virtually 100% of the new jobs under Biden have also gone to illegal aliens. Did you know that?” Trump said in his remarks. “100% of the new jobs have gone to illegal aliens, can you believe it?”
But he’s wrong. According to estimates from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, total employment for the native-born population has increased by almost 7.4 million under Biden. The employment level for people born in America was at 123,065,000 in January 2021, when Biden took office, and it was up to 130,445,000, as of May 2024.
Meanwhile, employment of foreign-born workers increased by about 5.6 million – from an estimated 25,318,000 in January 2021 to 30,896,000 in May 2024. BLS says the foreign-born population, meaning those who weren’t citizens at birth, includes “legally-admitted immigrants, refugees, temporary residents such as students and temporary workers, and undocumented immigrants.” There is no employment breakdown for just people in the U.S. illegally.
Trump may have been referring to a February analysis by the Center for Immigration Studies, an organization that favors low immigration, which found that, when comparing the fourth quarter of 2019 with the fourth quarter of 2023, the U.S.-born employment level declined by 183,000 and the immigrant employment level increased by 2.9 million.
But Biden did not become president until more than a year after the fourth quarter of 2019; he took office when the U.S. economy was still recovering from millions of job losses during the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020. So, the CIS analysis does not illustrate the change in employment under Biden. It also does not include employment data for only people without legal status.
Black Income and Wages
After falsely claiming that “illegal aliens” have taken all of the new jobs, Trump said, “Meanwhile, real wages of African Americans and the workers from all over the world that came here legally, they’re down 6% under Crooked Joe.”
Three days before that in Phoenix, Trump claimed that “real income for African Americans is down more than 6%” under Biden.
But as of 2022, the real median income for Black-only households was $52,860, according to the latest inflation-adjusted figures from the U.S. Census Bureau. That was up about 2% from $51,880 in 2020 and $51,750 in 2019. (Figures for 2023 should be out in September.)
On the other hand, more recent data from the BLS show that real wages for Black Americans are down – but by less than Trump claimed.
For Black full-time workers, real median usual weekly earnings, when adjusted for inflation and measured in dollars valued at their average level in 1982-84, were $293 in the first quarter of 2024. That was down 3.6% from $304 during the fourth quarter of 2020.
However, some economistsargue that wage statistics were inflated in 2020 because low-wage workers disproportionately lost their jobs during the COVID-19 pandemic. With millions of low-wage workers out of the workforce, average and median wages appeared to increase because workers with higher earnings kept or gained jobs.
Compared with the fourth quarter of 2019, which was before the pandemic started in early 2020, the real weekly earnings of Black full-time workers are currently down just 0.3%.
Black and Hispanic Unemployment
Unemployment rates under Biden — overall and by race — are low, as we recently reported. The rates for Black and Hispanic Americans reached or tied record lows.
Yet Trump claimed, without evidence, that migrant border crossings under Biden had created “flat-out economic warfare” on Black and Hispanic Americans by “taking the jobs” of those workers.
He also claimed, as he said in Phoenix, “Unions are being absolutely slaughtered because people are coming in, and they’re taking those union jobs.” The data on union membership rates don’t show a slaughtering in recent years.
In Las Vegas, Trump claimed that “with his border nightmare, Joe Biden is also waging an all-out war on the workers of America, especially African-Americans and Hispanic Americans.” In Phoenix, he added, “These people are taking the jobs of African Americans. They’re taking the jobs of Hispanic Americans, and it’s — they’re tremendously affected.”
Data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics doesn’t support that.
The Black unemployment rate was 9.3% when Biden took office, and it’s now 6.1% as of May. Over that time, it hit a record low of 4.8% in April 2023. The current 6.1% rate is the same as the pre-pandemic rate in February 2020.
The Hispanic or Latino unemployment rate was 8.5% when Biden took office and has dropped to 5% as of May. In September 2022, it tied a record rate of 3.9%, which was first hit under the Trump administration. The rate now is 0.7 percentage points above the pre-pandemic rate of 4.3%.
There are also more job openings in the U.S. than job seekers: 8.1 million job openings in April and 6.5 million unemployed job seekers the same month.
The number of unemployed Black Americans has gone down under Biden, from 1.9 million people when he took office to 1.3 million in May. The level of Hispanic or Latino unemployment dropped from 2.5 million to 1.6 million over the same time period.
As for Trump’s claim that people who have crossed the border illegally are taking union jobs, the available statistics don’t back that up, either. Our fact-checking colleagues at Politifact interviewed economists and labor experts on this issue, who said migrants who come to the U.S. aren’t likely to take union jobs and instead work in lower level jobs such as being a day laborer.
A 2022 Cato Institute working paper posited that immigration overall from 1980 to 2020 led to a 5.7 percentage point reduction in union density in the U.S. because immigrants “have lower preferences for unionization and increase diversity in the working population that, in turn, decreases solidarity among workers.” That paper doesn’t show immigrants are taking union jobs, but rather having an effect on unionization. (And one of the authors of the report noted on the Cato website that there were other issues to consider, such as whether “unions reduce immigration rather than immigration reducing unions.”)
Regardless, the yearly rates of union membership among wage and salary workers under Biden don’t show evidence that unions are being “slaughtered,” as Trump claimed.
In 2023, 10% of wage and salary workers were union members, down from 10.8% in 2020, the year before Biden took office. But the rate has been declining for several decades; it was 20.1% in 1983, according to BLS figures.
The rate declined under Trump, too, until the COVID-19 pandemic hit. The union membership rate was 10.7% in 2016, before Trump took office, and it dropped to 10.3% in 2019. The following year, when a union job could have offered more security than others during the pandemic, as researchers found, the rate went up to 10.8%.
The question of how immigration overall, not only illegal immigration, affects the U.S. economy and jobs has long been debated and studied. We wrote about the issue in 2010 and found: “Study after study has shown that immigrants grow the economy, expanding demand for goods and services that the foreign-born workers and their families consume, and thereby creating jobs. There is even broad agreement among economists that while immigrants may push down wages for some, the overall effect is to increase average wages for American-born workers.”
A report by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine released in 2016 largely reiterated those conclusions. It said there was “little evidence that immigration significantly affects the overall employment levels of native-born workers,” according to a press release on the report, and that the impact on wages over a 10-year or longer period was “very small.” However, the National Academies said there was “some evidence that recent immigrants reduce the employment rate of prior immigrants” and that if there is a negative impact on wages, it’s “most likely to be found for prior immigrants or native-born workers who have not completed high school—who are often the closest substitutes for immigrant workers with low skills.”
Those conclusions, too, are for all of the foreign-born in the U.S., not solely those who entered the U.S. illegally.
Those in the country illegally don’t have legal authorization to work — but many do anyway. A 2022 Congressional Research Service report said most of those in the country illegally participate in the labor force, and their jobs are “highly concentrated in certain industries, including agriculture, construction, leisure/hospitality, services, and manufacturing.” (Those who have applied for asylum have to wait six months to receive a work authorization.)
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In 1923, scientist Frederick Banting sold his insulin patent for $1, saying, “Insulin does not belong to me, it belongs to the world.”
Rating:
What’s True
Canadian scientist Frederick Banting and his co-discoverers of insulin sold their patent to the University of Toronto for $1 in a deal that was finalized in 1923.
What’s False
However, there is no evidence that Banting ever said “Insulin does not belong to me, it belongs to the world.”
On June 12, 2024, a Reddit post on the r/BeAmazed subreddit claimed that, in January 1923, Frederick Banting sold his insulin patent for $1, saying, “Insulin does not belong to me, it belongs to the world.” As of this writing, the post has received around 23,000 upvotes.
The alleged quote has circulated widely for years. The World Health Organization’s Facebook page shared an image featuring it on June 11, 2024. U.S. Rep. Ro Khanna, a California Democrat, posted an abridged version on X in 2019. The quote also appears in a number of published books and scholarly journal articles.
Despite the quote’s prevalence across different types of media, Snopes found no evidence that Banting, the Canadian scientist who won a Nobel Prize for discovering insulin, ever said it. However, it is true that Banting and two colleagues sold their patent for the lifesaving drug for just $1 in 1923. As such, we rate this claim a “Mixture” of truth and falsity.
The original source for the quote appears to be a children’s biography of Banting titled “The Discoverer of Insulin: Dr. Frederick Banting,” written by I.E. Levine and published in 1959, 18 years after Banting died in a plane crash. Neither the quote nor any variation thereof appears in any of the sources cited in the bibliography at the end of the book.
The quote also does not appear in any of the biographies of Banting written for adults, such as Michael Bliss’s acclaimed “Banting: A Biography,” or in any legitimate media coverage of Banting from either before or after his death. As such, the likeliest explanation for the origin of the quote is that Levine, the author of biographical books for children, used artistic license to imagine something Banting might have said.
The details of Banting’s sale of the patent for insulin, on the other hand, are well-documented and can be substantiated.
The patent’s buyer, the University of Toronto, has made digital scans of the original patent assignment document available online. The amount the University of Toronto paid Banting and his colleagues Charles Herbert Best and James Bertram Collip for the patent, $1, is clearly noted on the document’s first full page.
(University of Toronto Libraries)
Eagle-eyed readers might note that the assignment document is dated Dec. 19, 1922, not 1923. The document’s cover sheet explains why 1923 is the year typically given for the sale: The transfer of the patent from Banting and his colleagues to the University of Toronto was not formally recorded in the Ottawa Patent and Copyright Office until Jan. 1, 1923, so the patent technically remained in the three scientists’ names until then.
According to the Bank of Canada’s Inflation Calculator, that $1 in 1923 would be worth around 17.46 Canadian dollars ($12.70) in 2024 — a substantial increase in terms of percent change, but still a remarkably low price for the patent for a drug of critical importance.
What about the reason Banting and his colleagues decided to sell the insulin patent for so little money? In an article published in the Journal of Clinical Investigation in 2021, diabetes researchers Gary F. Lewis and Patricia L. Brubaker explained the rationale for the sale, which was more complicated than the simple altruism suggested by memes about Banting.
In short, the sale was part of a larger agreement between the scientists, the University of Toronto and U.S. drug company Eli Lilly intended to ramp up production of the drug in order to meet demand as quickly as possible. As part of the terms of the agreement, Eli Lilly committed to licensing insulin from the University of Toronto and manufacturing and distributing the drug free of charge to certain hospitals for one year.
After that year, Eli Lilly was left with an effective monopoly on U.S. rights to the drug, which it was legally free to profit from. According to Lewis and Brubaker, in the first year the company was allowed to charge for the drug, Eli Lilly brought in more than $1 million, equivalent to around $18.4 million in 2024, from insulin sales alone. In other words, although Banting did not make a direct profit from insulin sales, the drug became highly profitable for Eli Lilly as a result of the terms of the sale.
Eli Lilly remains one of the three main suppliers of insulin in the U.S., with the others being Sanofi and Novo Nordisk. Following price caps announced in 2023, Eli Lilly and Sanofi now charge a maximum out-of-pocket price of $35 a month for the most widely prescribed form of insulin. Novo Nordisk has also implemented programs to reduce out-of-pocket costs for diabetes patients.
Before the implementation of U.S. price caps, however, American insulin prices far surpassed those in other countries. In a study comparing insulin prices in the U.S. with those in other countries, the RAND Corp. found that in October 2019 the average U.S. price per standard unit of the drug was $98.70, compared with $7.52 in the U.K., $9.08 in France and $12 in Canada.
In summary, it is true that Banting and his insulin co-discoverers sold their patent for the drug to the University of Toronto for $1 in a sale that was finalized in 1923. However, there is no evidence that Banting ever said “Insulin does not belong to me, it belongs to the world,” despite the widespread appearance of the quote on social media and elsewhere. Additionally, although the 1923 sale of the insulin patent significantly sped up the availability of the drug worldwide, it did not directly result in universally affordable insulin prices.
Sources
Assignment to the Governors of the University of Toronto. Collections U of T. collections.library.utoronto.ca, https://collections.library.utoronto.ca/view/insulin:Q10013. Accessed 13 June 2024.
Bliss, Michael. Banting: A Biography. University of Toronto Press, 1992.
Diem, P., et al. “The Discovery of Insulin.” Diabetes Epidemiology and Management, vol. 5, Jan. 2022, p. 100049. ScienceDirect, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.deman.2021.100049.
“Drugmaker Eli Lilly Caps the Cost of Insulin at $35 a Month, Bringing Relief for Millions.” NBC News, 1 Mar. 2023, https://www.nbcnews.com/health/health-news/eli-lilly-caps-cost-insulin-35-month-rcna72713.
Friedman, Lester D., and Therese Jones. Routledge Handbook of Health and Media. Taylor & Francis, 2022.
Inflation Calculator. https://www.bankofcanada.ca/rates/related/inflation-calculator/. Accessed 13 June 2024.
Inflation Calculator | Find US Dollar’s Value From 1913-2024. 12 June 2024, https://www.usinflationcalculator.com/.
Levine, I. E. (Israel E. ). The Discoverer of Insulin: Dr. Frederick Banting. New York, J. Messner, 1959. Internet Archive, http://archive.org/details/discovererofinsu00levi.
Lewis, Gary F., and Patricia L. Brubaker. “The Discovery of Insulin Revisited: Lessons for the Modern Era.” The Journal of Clinical Investigation, vol. 131, no. 1, p. e142239. PubMed Central, https://doi.org/10.1172/JCI142239. Accessed 13 June 2024.
Luhby, Tami. “More Americans Can Now Get Insulin for $35 | CNN Politics.” CNN, 1 Jan. 2024, https://www.cnn.com/2024/01/01/politics/insulin-price-cap/index.html.
—. “Novo Nordisk Becomes Latest to Announce It Is Cutting Insulin Prices by up to 75%.” CNN, 14 Mar. 2023, https://www.cnn.com/2023/03/14/health/novo-nordisk-insulin-prices/index.html.
Mulcahy, Andrew W., et al. Comparing Insulin Prices in the United States to Other Countries: Results from a Price Index Analysis. RAND Corporation, 6 Oct. 2020. www.rand.org, https://www.rand.org/pubs/research_reports/RRA788-1.html.
“The Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine 1923.” NobelPrize.Org, https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/medicine/1923/banting/facts/. Accessed 13 June 2024.
A new study by Pew Research reveals that X, formerly known as Twitter, has the most dedicated following of news-seekers among social media platforms.
While most U.S. users on Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok do not primarily use these sites for news, X users cite staying informed as a significant reason for their engagement. Approximately half of X’s users report regularly obtaining news from the platform.
According to Pew, Facebook remains the leading social media news source for Americans, with 30% of adults regularly getting news there, compared to Instagram (16%), TikTok (14%), and X (12%).
However, 50% of X users regularly get news on the app, surpassing TikTok (40%), Facebook (37%), and Instagram (30%) in this regard. X also stands out, with 65% of its users naming news as a primary reason for using the platform, compared to 15% of TikTok users, 7% of Facebook users, and 8% of Instagram users.
Following its legacy of real-time news updates, 75% of X users report seeing breaking news in real time, compared to 58% on Facebook, 55% on TikTok, and 44% on Instagram.
The sources of news on these platforms vary significantly. On Instagram and Facebook, “friends and family” are the primary sources of news, whereas on X, this is the least common source. Instead, X users primarily see news from influencers or celebrities (49%), advocacy or nonprofit organizations (46%), other people they don’t know personally (75%), and news outlets and journalists (80%).
Another aspect of Pew’s findings is that X, while having a dedicated base of news-seekers, also has the highest incidence of inaccurate reporting. Among the platforms studied, 86% of X users reported encountering inaccurate news, with 37% saying they see it frequently.
As Meta reduces its news output on platforms like Instagram, Facebook, and Threads, X under Elon Musk remains a key player in news dissemination.
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