The announcement is official: a graphic carrying a ministry's, a broadcaster's or a company's house style speaks for that institution
By The Conspiratory EditorsAugust 22, 2026
Where the evidence lands: ContradictedThat an announcement circulating as a graphic in an institution's own visual style, carrying its logo, its colours and its usual phrasing, can be treated as that institution speaking, and acted on or forwarded accordingly.
Contradicted. What this file rates is not a single claim but an inference: that a card in an institution's visual register, circulating on Facebook or WhatsApp, came from that institution. On the artifacts collected here it fails, and it fails across every kind of body a person might trust. In a fortnight in August 2026, fact-checkers in five countries traced fabricated announcements to a South African government department, a Kenyan education ministry, a Kenyan anti-corruption agency, three national newspapers in three languages, an American television station, a Kenyan news site and Brazil's national immunisation programme. None required a convincing image of a person and none needed generative tools. Two things follow that the individual checks do not say. The fakes sit on a gradient, running from a wholly invented story on a cloned domain at one end to a real sentence with its second half removed at the other, so a reader looking for fabrication will miss most of the range. And the direction of the payload is not fixed: one of these urged people to go and get vaccinated. The borrowed thing is the standing to announce, not the message.
Believed by: Almost everyone at some point, and disproportionately people who consider themselves hard to fool about AI. Parents checking a school calendar, voters reading a political graphic and patients hearing about a vaccine release are not being credulous when they trust a card in a familiar house style: they are reading it exactly as the real ones are meant to be read
Every artifact in this file so far has been a broadcast: a press release, a front page, an election schedule, a ministry directive, things that assert something about the world to everyone at once. This one is addressed to you. Lead Stories rated on 1 September a viral image presented as a UK Ministry of Defence letter signed by Prime Minister Andy Burnham, ordering British military veterans back to active service in the Army because of the security situation in Eastern Europe. No credible outlet reported any such order, the letter carried multiple inconsistencies, and it appears to have come from a self-described satire account, posting to X on 31 August. The change of form matters more than the change of subject. A counterfeit announcement invites you to believe something; a counterfeit recall order instructs you to do something, and it works on a reader who has served by making them the subject rather than the audience. Fear of a personal obligation is a faster response than curiosity about a public claim, and it is less likely to survive contact with a search engine because the recipient is looking for what to do rather than whether it is true. Note also where it came from, because it is becoming the recurring shape of this material: the account described itself as satire and the image travelled without that description. That is the fifth case in about a week where a creator labelled the work and the label did not survive the journey, alongside the Melania Canal post, two Indian scripted videos, and an animal shelter clip whose original carried an AI disclaimer. source →
The counterfeit-institution format has attached itself to the Lake America story, and it did so by inventing a news report rather than a government one. Lead Stories rated on 30 August a claim that Fox News had reported Canada was blocking vessels from passing through the Welland Canal if their paperwork used the name Lake America. Fox News reported no such thing. The underlying situation is real, which is what makes the graft work: an executive order in late August directed that Lake Ontario be styled Lake America in government publications, during a dispute with Canada, and the change was visible on mapping services. An audience that had just watched a real name change take effect had every reason to expect a retaliation story, and the fabrication supplied one shaped exactly as the next beat would be. Worth noting alongside the ministry and agency artifacts already in this file: the borrowed authority here is a news network rather than a state body. The requirements are the same, a recognisable name and a plausible format, and so is the answer, which is that the named outlet either filed the report or it did not, and that is checkable in a minute on the outlet's own site. source →
Somebody is running a series. Africa Check reported on 25 August that a graphic carrying the logo of the Kenyan news site Kenyans.co.ke, dated 12 August, quoting the opposition politician Fred Matiang'i as promising to slaughter 50 cows to celebrate victory in the 2027 election, is fabricated. The outlet published nothing of the kind, and local media follow his remarks closely enough that a statement like that would have been reported. It was shared widely, drawing thousands of engagements, by users arguing his priorities are misplaced. What lifts this above another tally mark is that Africa Check rated a different fake graphic, under the same masthead and against the same politician, on 21 August, and that one is among the founding artifacts of this file. Two counterfeits inside two weeks, same borrowed brand, same target, different fabricated quotes. Everything else collected here reads as opportunistic: somebody made a card, it travelled, a checker caught it. A repeat against one person under one masthead is a different thing, and it means the useful question about an artifact is not only whether the institution published it but whether that institution's branding has been used this way before. This file has emphasised checking the channel. The Matiang'i pair adds a second check that costs nothing: look for the last time the same logo was faked. source →
The first institution in this file to say out loud what was stolen. Factly reported on 25 August that posts circulating in Andhra Pradesh as the official schedule for the 2026 local body elections are fake. What is new is the response. Anil Chandra Punetha, the state election commissioner, did not simply direct people to official channels: he said the posts are entirely false, that those spreading them are misusing official emblems, and that strict action would be taken, while confirming that the real schedule will be released through a press release and media conferences. The state government's own fact-check unit corroborated it on X on 24 August. Both halves of that matter. Every earlier case here ended with an institution pointing at its verified accounts and declining to describe the artifact, and this file has argued they decline because they cannot distinguish the counterfeit from their own output by appearance. Punetha instead identified the borrowed asset precisely, the official insignia, and attached a threat of enforcement to it. And the corroborating body is not a newsroom or an independent fact-checker but a standing government fact-check operation, which is a response format none of the other eight artifacts drew. Whether naming the mechanism and promising prosecution works better than pointing at a channel is an open question, but it is the first attempt in this collection to do anything other than the latter. The targeting, meanwhile, is unchanged: an electorate waiting on a date. source →
A third format in three days, and the strongest single refutation this file has been able to record. Africa Check reported on 25 August that an image circulating widely in Kenya as the front page of the Daily Nation, dated 14 August 2026, announced that the Teachers Service Commission would reward and confirm the pioneer junior secondary school interns of February 2023 as deputies, moving them to higher job grades with billions of shillings allocated and the exercise set for January 2027. The page is fabricated. What makes the refutation unusually clean is that a newspaper front page is a dated object with exactly one correct version. Africa Check simply found the real one: the actual Daily Nation front page for 14 August carried the headline Governors race against time, with a different summary beneath it. There is no interpretive room in that. The newspaper had already posted a blurred copy of the fake on 20 August stamped FAKE NEWS ALERT, which is the same provenance response every institution in this file has given. The targeting is the now familiar part. Kenya's Teachers Service Commission advertised 30,550 teacher vacancies in December 2022, and those hires became the first junior secondary cohort under the competency-based curriculum. So the fake speaks to roughly thirty thousand named people waiting on a decision about their own grade and pay, which is precisely the audience the Nigerian recruitment release found the day before. Two countries, two days, two entirely different formats, one targeting principle. source →
A ninth country within hours of the eighth, and the most carefully aimed artifact this file has collected. Africa Check reported on 24 August that Facebook posts were circulating what appeared to be a press release from Nigeria's interior ministry, signed by the minister Olubunmi Tunji-Ojo, announcing that recruitment into the Civil Defence, Correctional, Fire and Immigration Services Board had been deferred until after the January 2027 general election. The ministry posted on its official X account that the document was fake, unauthorised and fraudulent, said it had issued no such release, and confirmed no deferral decision had been taken. Three things separate this from everything above. The counterfeit is a press release rather than a shareable card, imitating the document format itself down to the minister's signature, which is a step up in both effort and register. Its reasoning is deliberately dull: it claims the 2026 appropriation contained no provision for the process and that the 2026 budget is fully expended, so remaining stages must wait for the 2027 budget. That is not an allegation of wrongdoing but an ordinary administrative explanation of the kind that really does postpone things, and it is far harder to disbelieve than a scandal would be. And the audience is enormous and specific. The exercise drew more than 1.9 million applications, with a computer-based test last November and physical screening and document verification in June 2026, so the fake reaches close to two million people who have already sat the test and are waiting on a result, and tells them the wait has just grown by eighteen months. The Kenyan school graphic found parents checking a date; this found applicants checking a life. source →
The first artifact since this file was built, and it is the construction described above almost line for line, in an eighth country. Factly rated false on 24 August a graphic circulating on Indian social media in the format of a Navbharat Times news card, carrying the paper's watermark, quoting the yoga guru Swami Ramdev praising the Congress party and apologising for having helped tarnish its image. Navbharat Times has said the graphic is fake and the statement fabricated. Factly checked Ramdev's own verified accounts and the paper's website and social handles and found nothing, and noted that a remark of that kind from him would have drawn wide coverage. Two details are worth adding to the pattern. The paper genuinely does publish Ramdev's statements as cards on its platforms, so the counterfeit is imitating a real and regular output rather than inventing a format, which is the vulnerability this file describes. And the timing is precise: it landed while Ramdev was in a live and widely covered public argument with the MP Kangana Ranaut, and one day after he said on 23 August that he did not want to take the dispute further. A fabricated statement arriving in the gap left by someone who has just stopped talking has no competing statement to contradict it. source →
The full story
Nine fakes, seven countries, one fortnight
Between 17 and 22 August 2026, three fact-checking organisations on three continents rated the same object. Not the same claim: the claims had nothing to do with each other. A South African government department was said to have told married couples to carry their marriage certificates. Kenyan schools were said to be reopening late. A Kenyan anti-corruption agency was said to have made an arrest. A Kenyan presidential contender was said to have withdrawn. Two European newspapers and an American television station were said to have published stories they had never written. Brazil's national health service was said to have released a pneumococcal vaccine to everyone over 58.
Every one of those was fabricated, and every one of them arrived in the same wrapper: a shareable card in the institution's own visual register. Logo in the corner, familiar typeface, the phrasing that body actually uses. The payloads span elections, school calendars, immigration, criminal justice and public health, across the United Kingdom, Germany, Italy, the United States, South Africa, Kenya and Brazil.
The individual checks all reach the right answer. What none of them is positioned to say is that they are looking at one thing. The borrowed asset is not a face, a voice or a story. It is an institution's standing to make an announcement, and that turns out to be the cheapest thing in the building to steal.
From wholly invented to barely touched
Line the artifacts up by how much of each one is actually false and they form a gradient, which is the part that matters for anyone trying to catch the next one.
At one end sits the counterfeit Daily Express story, invented outright and hosted on a cloned site at dailyexpress.uk.com, a domain registered on 16 August, three days before the story ran. The fabricated La Repubblica piece used the same trick more cheaply, pointing at repupplica.com, a single-character lookalike that needs no cloned design to survive a glance.
A step along, the Home Affairs graphic and the Citizen TVschool card invent the announcement but borrow the container: a real minister's photograph, a real broadcaster's branding. Further along still, the anti-corruption video invents nothing visual at all. Its footage is authentic: a genuine operation in Karen on 9 March 2026. Only the caption is new.
And at the far end are two artifacts where the institution really did say something close to it. The Matiang'i graphic quotes a sentence he actually spoke, that heaven matters more to him than State House, and simply removes the clause where he asks for support in his presidential bid, converting an appeal for votes into a withdrawal. The Starbucks claim, running since 2017 and rechecked by Full Fact on 19 August 2026, takes a real pledge to hire 10,000 refugees and changes one word to Muslims. The company reconfirmed the pledge was for refugees; by 2024 it said it had directly hired more than 5,500 of them, 1,500 in Europe, the Middle East and Africa.
Nothing in that last pair is fabricated in the sense a detection tool understands. A reader hunting for invention will find none and conclude the card is sound.
Why trusting the house style is not naive
It is worth being fair to the reader who forwards one of these, because the reasoning behind it is sound and the institutions themselves built the premise.
Ministries, agencies, election bodies and broadcasters have spent a decade moving their announcements onto exactly this surface. A public health campaign is a graphic. A school calendar change is a graphic. An arrest is announced with a photograph and a caption. The organisations did this deliberately, because a card travels through WhatsApp and Facebook in a way a press release never will, and because reaching people where they are is the whole point.
So the format genuinely does carry official information most of the time. A person who treats a ministry-styled card as a ministry announcement is not being credulous; they are reading it the way the ministry taught them to. The Kenyan parent checking whether term starts on the 24th is doing ordinary, sensible admin. The failure is not in the reader's judgement. It is that the design of the channel makes the counterfeit and the genuine article physically identical, and no amount of care resolves an object that carries no distinguishing information.
The institutions all gave the same answer, and it was not about the image
Here is the detail that closes the case, and it emerges only when the artifacts are read together. Every affected body responded, and not one of them told the public how to spot the fake.
South Africa's Department of Home Affairs reposted the graphic stamped FAKE NEWSand said that official announcements by the minister are communicated through official Home Affairs channels and verified social media accounts. Kenya's Ministry of Education issued a press statement on 19 August confirming the academic calendar was unchanged and the third term would begin on 24 August as scheduled. The Ethics and Anti-Corruption Commission said it had run no such operation and called the reports false and misleading. In a closely related retail case, John Lewis told Full Fact that genuine offers appear on its website or its app.
Four institutions, three countries, one instruction: check where it came from, not what it looks like. That is a concession, and a significant one. These are the organisations best placed to describe the difference between their own output and a counterfeit, and every one of them declined to try. They cannot describe it because there is nothing to describe.
Africa Check's own method points the same way. In each case the finding was an absence: nothing on the department's site or verified accounts, no graphic from Citizen TV or any local outlet, no trace on the news site's verified pages. The question that resolved all four was not is this graphic well made but does the institution's own channel carry it. The second question has an answer. The first does not.
Built to be forwarded, and built out of true things
Two features explain why these travel further than a deepfake, and neither is about gullibility.
The first is timing. The Kenyan school graphic began circulating on 18 August, six days before a reopening date parents were already looking up, after a holiday that had begun on 31 July. The Home Affairs advisory attached itself to an unrelated scandal then dominating South African feeds, which supplied a plausible reason for a government to issue a new rule that week. A fabricated announcement with no live question behind it dies quietly. These arrived as answers to questions people were actively asking, which is also why they get forwarded: passing on a school date feels like a favour, not a political act.
The second is that spot-checking works, and returns the wrong answer. The minister in the graphic is the real minister. The logo is the real logo. The raid footage shows a real raid. The sentence in quotation marks was really spoken. The corporate pledge was really made. A careful reader who picks one element and verifies it gets a confirmation, and reasonably treats that confirmation as covering the card. The authentic components are not filler. They are the credential, and there is generally only one false component in the whole object.
This is the same construction documented elsewhere on this site in a different medium, where a compilation of earthquake footage passed around in August 2026 mixed three genuine clips of the disaster with three recycled from other countries, so that anyone checking one video had even odds of confirming the montage. Real material laundering false material inside a single artifact is now showing up in video and in text cards at the same time.
Check the channel, not the card
Keep two things separate. On one side is what is documented: nine fabricated announcements rated by three independent fact-checking organisations between 17 and 22 August 2026, each traced by finding that the institution named on it had published nothing of the kind, and in several cases by the institution saying so directly. On the other is the belief this file rates, which is the everyday assumption that a card in an institution's house style is that institution speaking. That assumption is the target, and on this record it does not hold.
One warning against reading the pattern too neatly. It is tempting to treat these as hostile messaging, and most of them are. But the Brazilian vaccine message is not: it tells people that a pneumococcal vaccine has been released for everyone over 58 and urges them to go and get it, wrapped in the mascot and the closing cadence of a real national immunisation campaign. It is still false, the national release did not happen, and the damage is real enough, since people outside the actual eligibility rules turn up, are turned away, and conclude something was withdrawn. Any account of this genre that defines it by a hostile agenda mis-describes a portion of its own evidence. The constant is the theft of the authority to announce, and that authority can be spent in any direction.
The practical residue is small and, unlike most verification advice, it survives the next improvement in the technology. Nothing here asked anyone to inspect a jawline. The four institutions asked people to go to the source: the department's own site, the broadcaster's verified account, the retailer's app. A forwarded image carries no channel with it, and that missing information is the point rather than an inconvenience. When the card arrives without a way to trace where it came from, the honest reading is that you do not yet know who is talking.
What's still unexplained
- Institutions keep answering with channel advice, telling the public to check verified accounts. That works for anyone who already knows which account is the real one. What does it offer a reader who encounters the graphic as a forwarded image with no account attached at all, which is how most of these travel?
- Several of the artifacts in this cluster attach themselves to calendar events: a reopening date, an election, a vaccination campaign. Is the timing being chosen deliberately, or is it simply that a fabricated announcement only gets traction when it answers a question people are already asking?
- The counterfeit newspaper items required a registered lookalike domain and, in one case, a scripted voice-over. The government and agency fakes required none of that. Does the cheaper construction spread further, or does the expensive one survive scrutiny longer?
- One message in the set urges vaccination. If the same technique carries public health messaging that a health service would broadly endorse, what is the right response from an institution whose authority has been borrowed to say something it agrees with but did not announce?
Point by point
The claim: A graphic in a government department's house style, carrying the minister's photograph, is the department speaking.
What the record shows: South Africa's Department of Home Affairs found no trace of the marriage certificate advisory on its own website or verified accounts, and reposted the graphic on 17 August 2026 with FAKE NEWS stamped across it. Africa Check also found no reporting of the supposed announcement by any credible outlet, which is the second red flag: a genuine national advisory generates coverage.
The claim: If the video is authentic footage of a real operation, the caption describing it is reliable.
What the record shows: A reverse image search on the Kenyan arrest video returned footage that had been circulating since March 2026 in connection with a different case entirely, an anti-corruption operation in Karen on 9 March. The commission said it had conducted no operation of the kind the posts described and called the reports false and misleading. Nothing in the footage was altered; only the label was.
The claim: A quotation shown in a news outlet's graphic, in quotation marks, is what the person said.
What the record shows: Africa Check located the video of Matiang'i's 12 August remarks and the passage the graphic drew on. He said that heaven is more important than State House while asking for prayers and support in his presidential bid. The graphic kept the first clause, discarded the second and added a line he did not say. The outlet whose logo it carried had published nothing of the kind on its verified accounts.
The claim: These fabrications are a product of generative AI, so AI detection will catch them.
What the record shows: Almost none of this cluster requires generative tools. A ministry advisory, a school calendar, an arrest caption, a price: each is a text card in a familiar layout, and several are built on genuinely authentic material. The one artifact that did take real effort took it in registration records rather than in pixels, with the counterfeit Daily Express domain registered on 16 August 2026, three days before the story it hosted appeared.
The claim: Fabricated announcements push a hostile agenda, so a message urging something benign is unlikely to be one.
What the record shows: The Brazilian Pneumo 23 message urges people to go and be vaccinated, using the mascot of the national immunisation programme and the closing register of a real health campaign. It is still false: the national release it describes did not happen, and public pneumococcal eligibility has specific rules the message ignores. The harm arrives as people outside those rules turning up and being turned away.
The claim: The obvious defence is to look harder at the graphic itself.
What the record shows: Every institution in this cluster reached for the same answer instead, and none of them mentioned the artifact. Home Affairs pointed to its official channels and verified accounts, the Kenyan education ministry issued a press statement restating the calendar, the anti-corruption commission issued a denial, and John Lewis told Full Fact in a related retail case that genuine offers appear on its website or its app. The advice converges on provenance because the institutions themselves cannot tell the counterfeits apart by appearance.
Timeline
- 2017-01Starbucks announces that it will hire 10,000 refugees globally over five years, a pledge made by the company's then chief executive Howard Schultz. Within days the figure is circulating with one word changed, as a pledge to hire 10,000 Muslims. The real announcement and the distorted version travel together from the start.
- 2024Starbucks says it has directly hired more than 5,500 refugees under the pledge, including 1,500 across Europe, the Middle East and Africa. The underlying commitment is documented and partly fulfilled, which is one reason the altered version is so durable: everything about it checks out except the word that was swapped.
- 2026-03-09Kenya's Ethics and Anti-Corruption Commission conducts an operation at the Entim Sidai Wellness Sanctuary in Karen, a Nairobi suburb, arresting a lawyer, a former high court judge, an auctioneer and a business executive over allegations that they solicited a bribe of about KSh10 million to influence a court case. The operation is real and is filmed. The footage will be repurposed five months later.
- 2026-08-12The Kenyan opposition politician Fred Matiang'i speaks at a burial ceremony and says that heaven is more important than State House, in a passage where he asks for prayers and support in his presidential bid. A video of the remarks is published on YouTube the same day. Within hours a graphic circulates quoting the first half of the sentiment and dropping the rest.
- 2026-08-16The domain dailyexpress.uk.com is registered, three days before a fabricated Daily Express video appears attributing a migration story to the paper. The counterfeit site is built to resemble the genuine one, whose real address is express.co.uk.
- 2026-08-17South Africa's Department of Home Affairs reposts a circulating graphic on its official X account with FAKE NEWS stamped across it. The graphic, which carries a picture of the home affairs minister, had claimed the department was advising married couples to carry their marriage certificates at all times. The department's statement names the remedy it wants people to use: official announcements come through official Home Affairs channels and verified accounts.
- 2026-08-18A graphic branded as breaking news from Citizen TV, a mainstream privately owned Kenyan broadcaster, begins circulating on Facebook claiming the Ministry of Education has postponed the reopening of schools scheduled for 24 August. Kenyan schools had closed on 31 July for a three-week holiday, so the fake lands in the window when parents are actively checking the date.
- 2026-08-19Kenya's Ministry of Education issues a press statement saying its attention has been drawn to misleading information circulating on social media and confirming that the academic calendar is unchanged. The same day, Full Fact publishes a fresh check on the Starbucks claim after seeing it shared hundreds of times again on Facebook and Instagram, and two counterfeit newspaper videos, attributed to the Daily Express and to Suddeutsche Zeitung, are posted on X from a single account.
- 2026-08-21Africa Check publishes four checks in a single morning, three of them the same construction: the Home Affairs advisory, the Citizen TV school graphic, the anti-corruption arrest video and a graphic carrying the logo of the Kenyan news site Kenyans.co.ke reporting that Matiang'i has quit the presidential race. Lead Stories separately rates a fabricated La Repubblica story hosted at repupplica.com, a character-level lookalike of the paper's real address.
- 2026-08-22Boatos rates a message spreading through Brazilian messaging apps claiming the Pneumo 23 vaccine has been temporarily released at public health posts nationwide for everyone aged 58 and over. It is built around Ze Gotinha, the official mascot of Brazil's national immunisation programme, and reproduces the register of a real public health campaign. It is the first artifact in the cluster whose payload asks people to do something a health service would broadly want them to do.
Contradicted. What this file rates is not a single claim but an inference: that a card in an institution's visual register, circulating on Facebook or WhatsApp, came from that institution. On the artifacts collected here it fails, and it fails across every kind of body a person might trust. In a fortnight in August 2026, fact-checkers in five countries traced fabricated announcements to a South African government department, a Kenyan education ministry, a Kenyan anti-corruption agency, three national newspapers in three languages, an American television station, a Kenyan news site and Brazil's national immunisation programme. None required a convincing image of a person and none needed generative tools. Two things follow that the individual checks do not say. The fakes sit on a gradient, running from a wholly invented story on a cloned domain at one end to a real sentence with its second half removed at the other, so a reader looking for fabrication will miss most of the range. And the direction of the payload is not fixed: one of these urged people to go and get vaccinated. The borrowed thing is the standing to announce, not the message.
Reviewed by The Conspiratory Editors · Last reviewed September 1, 2026 · How we rate
Common questions
Is Fake official announcements true?
Contradicted. What this file rates is not a single claim but an inference: that a card in an institution's visual register, circulating on Facebook or WhatsApp, came from that institution. On the artifacts collected here it fails, and it fails across every kind of body a person might trust. In a fortnight in August 2026, fact-checkers in five countries traced fabricated announcements to a South African government department, a Kenyan education ministry, a Kenyan anti-corruption agency, three national newspapers in three languages, an American television station, a Kenyan news site and Brazil's national immunisation programme. None required a convincing image of a person and none needed generative tools. Two things follow that the individual checks do not say. The fakes sit on a gradient, running from a wholly invented story on a cloned domain at one end to a real sentence with its second half removed at the other, so a reader looking for fabrication will miss most of the range. And the direction of the payload is not fixed: one of these urged people to go and get vaccinated. The borrowed thing is the standing to announce, not the message.
What is Fake official announcements?
Three years of public advice about misinformation have pointed at faces. Watch the hands, watch the mouth, watch for the shimmer where a jawline meets a collar. The artifacts collected here contain no faces to inspect. They are announcement cards: a ministry advisory, a school reopening notice, an arrest, a candidate's withdrawal, a vacc…
What does the evidence show?
South Africa's Department of Home Affairs found no trace of the marriage certificate advisory on its own website or verified accounts, and reposted the graphic on 17 August 2026 with FAKE NEWS stamped across it. Africa Check also found no reporting of the supposed announcement by any credible outlet, which is the second red flag: a genui…
Why do people believe it?
The genuine article looks the same. Ministries, agencies and broadcasters really do publish announcements as shareable images with a logo, a photograph and a headline. Trusting the format is not carelessness, it is doing what the format was designed to make you do.
What is still unresolved?
Institutions keep answering with channel advice, telling the public to check verified accounts. That works for anyone who already knows which account is the real one. What does it offer a reader who encounters the graphic as a forwarded image with no account attached at all, which is how most of these travel?
Sources
- 1.No, South Africa's Department of Home Affairs did not 'advise married couples to carry marriage certificate at all times', Africa Check (2026)
- 2.Kenyans, ignore graphics claiming reopening of schools for third term postponed, Africa Check (2026)
- 3.Kenya's anti-corruption agency did not arrest Gachagua-linked judge and lawyer over alleged impeachment bribery scandal, Africa Check (2026)
- 4.No, Kenyan opposition politician Fred Matiang'i has not quit presidential race, viral graphic fabricated, Africa Check (2026)
- 5.Starbucks never pledged to hire 10,000 Muslims, Full Fact (2026)
- 6.Fact Check: Fake Daily Express video reports UK plans to bring 4,000 migrants from Ceuta into the UK, Lead Stories (2026)
- 7.Fact Check: Sueddeutsche Zeitung did not publish the report attributed to it, Lead Stories (2026)
- 8.Fact Check: La Repubblica did not report that a French politician bought a 15 million euro villa, Lead Stories (2026)
- 9.Fact Check: Story about a woman herding goats through Walmart is made up, Lead Stories (2026)
- 10.Vacina Pneumo 23 foi liberada para todas pessoas acima de 58 anos nos postos de saude do SUS em todo o Brasil, Boatos.org (2026)
- 11.No, Argos isn't selling a garden storage bench for as little as £3, Full Fact (2026)
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