Conspiracy theories of The 2020s
Pandemic, AI, and elections: the newest and fastest-moving conspiracy theories, updated as the stories break.
“Corona Jihad,” the 2020 claim that Muslims were deliberately spreading COVID-19 across India, was a debunked, Islamophobic misinformation campaign
In March 2020, as India entered lockdown, a religious gathering of the Tablighi Jamaat, a Sunni missionary movement, at its Nizamuddin Markaz headquarters in Delhi was identified as a coronavirus cluster. Within days that fact was transformed into “Corona Jihad”: a false claim that Indian Muslims were deliberately, as a community and as a plot, spreading COVID-19 to infect and kill Hindus. A flood of videos supposedly showing Muslim men sneezing, spitting, and licking utensils to spread the virus went viral; fact-checkers Alt News and The Quint traced them to old clips, unrelated events, and footage filmed in other countries. The smear fueled real harm: assaults on Muslims, boycotts of Muslim vendors, and hospitals turning patients away by religion. Indian courts later found the congregation’s attendees had been made “scapegoats” and cleared them. This file reports the hoax and the harm; it does not repeat the accusation as fact.
Read the case file →Bill Gates is using COVID-19 vaccines to implant trackable microchips in the global population
In the first frightening months of the COVID-19 pandemic, a claim spread that the illness, or the vaccines being developed against it, was a pretext: Bill Gates, through his foundation's global-health work, supposedly meant to inject the world with microchips or nanotech that could track or control people. A May 2020 poll found that roughly a quarter of American adults believed some form of it. The claim was assembled from real pieces bent out of shape: a genuine MIT project, funded by Gates, that explored an invisible under-the-skin dye to record who had been vaccinated (a dye, not a chip, and never used in COVID vaccines); a real Gates remark about digital certificates of vaccination status; and a real 2019 pandemic-preparedness simulation. This case file separates those documented facts from the microchip story, which the evidence does not support, while keeping honest questions about philanthropic power and data privacy in their own lane.
Read the case file →Central bank digital currencies are a coordinated plan to abolish cash, surveil every transaction, and let the state freeze or program your money
Central bank digital currencies are real. China is running the world's largest digital-yuan pilot, the European Central Bank is preparing a digital euro, and dozens of other central banks are studying the idea. So is the underlying worry: a digital form of state money could, if built carelessly, record every transaction, be switched off for individuals, or be programmed to expire or restrict what it buys. That genuine design question is the seed of a much larger claim: that CBDCs are a single, coordinated plot to abolish cash and impose a social-credit system of total control. The surveillance risk is documented and unsettled. The coordinated-tyranny plot is not, and the halting, openly argued, frequently abandoned real-world record cuts against it.
Read the case file →COVID-19 leaked from the U.S. Army biolab at Fort Detrick, not from Wuhan
The claim, promoted from 2020 onward by Chinese foreign-ministry spokespeople and state media, that SARS-CoV-2 escaped from the U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases at Fort Detrick, Maryland, rather than emerging in Wuhan. A real event sits underneath it: the CDC did pause research at the lab in 2019 over biosafety lapses. But no evidence connects that pause, or the lab, to the coronavirus, and analysts across the BBC, VOA, DFRLab, and the AP have documented the Fort Detrick narrative as a state-directed information operation that assigns blame without proof. This file rates only that Fort Detrick claim; it does not attempt to settle where the pandemic did begin.
Read the case file →COVID-19 mRNA vaccines are causing a wave of fast, aggressive 'turbo cancers'
“Turbo cancer” is a phrase with no medical meaning, used online to claim that COVID-19 mRNA vaccines are triggering a wave of unusually fast, aggressive, treatment-resistant cancers that health authorities are hiding. The claim rests not on a body of evidence but on a stack of weaker things: raw counts pulled from a voluntary adverse-event database, emotionally powerful individual stories, and technical arguments about the vaccines that do not hold up on inspection. Cancer is common and most of the population was vaccinated, so coincidental timing between a shot and a later diagnosis is expected rather than telling. When researchers have actually measured cancer rates, they have found no vaccine-driven surge; a 2024 National Cancer Institute study found cancer diagnoses did not even rebound to make up for those missed during the pandemic. This file separates the real, narrow facts that get stretched from the false conclusion built on top of them.
Read the case file →Global elites are deliberately engineering food shortages to control or depopulate the public
The claim that a network of global elites, usually framed as the World Economic Forum, the 'Great Reset,' billionaires, or 'globalists,' is deliberately manufacturing food scarcity through factory fires, fertilizer bans, livestock culls, and farmland buy-ups, in order to control or depopulate ordinary people. Real supply shocks and real, contested farm policy sit underneath the story; the coordinated-plot reading laid over them does not survive contact with the evidence.
Read the case file →Iran shot down Ukraine International Airlines Flight PS752 near Tehran in January 2020 and denied it for three days before the Revolutionary Guard admitted firing two missiles at the plane
In the early hours of 8 January 2020, hours after Iran fired ballistic missiles at US bases in Iraq in retaliation for the killing of General Qassem Soleimani, Ukraine International Airlines Flight PS752, a Boeing 737-800 bound for Kyiv, took off from Tehran's Imam Khomeini airport. Minutes later it was hit by two Tor-M1 missiles launched by an IRGC air-defence unit and crashed, killing all 167 passengers and 9 crew, among them scores of Iranians, Iranian-Canadians, Ukrainians, and others. Iran spent three days denying that a missile was involved, insisting it was a technical fault, before the armed forces admitted the shootdown on 11 January. This file separates the documented and admitted core, the missile strike and the initial denial, from the still-contested layer of intent and command responsibility, which Iran calls pure accident and which international investigators say its obstruction has left unresolved.
Read the case file →Iranian nuclear scientist Mohsen Fakhrizadeh was killed in 2020 by a remote-controlled, AI-assisted machine gun mounted in a parked truck, an operation widely attributed to Israel's Mossad
On 27 November 2020, Mohsen Fakhrizadeh, an Iranian physicist and Revolutionary Guard officer whom Israel and the West had long named as the driving force behind Iran's nuclear-weapons program, was ambushed and killed on a road in Absard, east of Tehran. What made the case remarkable was not only the target but the weapon: Iranian officials and later a detailed New York Times investigation described a remote-controlled machine gun, fitted with AI-assisted aiming and facial recognition, concealed in a parked Nissan pickup truck and operated from a distant location, with no assassin physically present. The device fired a burst in under a minute, killed Fakhrizadeh, spared his wife beside him, and then self-destructed. Iran immediately blamed Israel's Mossad. This file separates the documented core, the killing and its unusual method, from the contested layer, the attribution to Israeli intelligence, which is strongly reported but never officially confirmed.
Read the case file →Mail-in and absentee voting is riddled with fraud that swings elections
As mail and absentee voting expanded, so did the claim that it is the soft underbelly of American elections: that mailed ballots are forged, harvested, and dumped by the thousands, and that this fraud is large enough to flip races. This case file separates two things that are usually blurred. Mail-ballot fraud is real and does occur, and one modern case, a ballot-harvesting operation in North Carolina's 9th congressional district in 2018, was serious enough that the state threw out the result and ordered a new election. But the measured rate of such fraud is tiny, states have voted largely by mail for decades without stolen outcomes, and no evidence shows mail fraud deciding a presidential election. The claim we rate, that mail voting is systematically rigged, is debunked; the real, rare cases are treated here honestly rather than waved away, because they are also the clearest proof that the safeguards catch it.
Read the case file →Major banks knowingly protected and enabled Jeffrey Epstein, moving more than a billion dollars for him as part of a coordinated cover-up
Jeffrey Epstein could not have run a global operation without banks to move the money, and the record of how the money moved is genuinely damning. Over two decades his cash flowed through JPMorgan, Deutsche Bank, Bank of New York Mellon, Bank of America, and others; regulators and a Senate committee later found billions in transfers, missed suspicious-activity reports, and years of ignored red flags. This case file separates that documented institutional failure from the central conspiracy claim: that the banks knowingly protected Epstein as part of a coordinated cover-up, or because he was a shielded intelligence asset. The failures are real and, in several cases, penalized. The knowing conspiracy is not established.
Read the case file →Muslims in India are deliberately spitting in or contaminating food sold to Hindus as a coordinated religious act
A false, Islamophobic claim spread that Muslims in India deliberately spit in, blow on, or otherwise contaminate food they prepare or sell to Hindus, framed as a coordinated 'jihad' to spread disease or complete a supposed religious ritual. There is no evidence any such coordinated practice exists. Fact-checkers have repeatedly shown the viral videos offered as proof are old, filmed abroad, not even of Muslims, staged, or lately AI-generated, and India's news regulator has cautioned broadcasters for casting isolated incidents as a communal plot. The Conspiratory covers this trope only to debunk it and to document the real-world harm it has done.
Read the case file →Nothing happened at the Lekki toll gate: the shooting of #EndSARS protesters was a 'phantom massacre' and soldiers fired only blanks
On the night of 20 October 2020, soldiers opened fire on unarmed #EndSARS protesters at the Lekki toll gate in Lagos. The Nigerian Army and the federal government responded not with an inquiry but with denial: first that troops were even present, then that they fired live ammunition, then that anyone had died, culminating in the label 'phantom massacre' and the claim of a 'massacre without blood or bodies.' The denial is the rated claim here, and it is debunked. A Lagos State judicial panel, Amnesty International, forensic pathologists, ballistics experts, and hours of geolocated video establish that live rounds were fired and that people were killed.
Read the case file →Old cars are being deliberately killed off to force everyone into surveillance-capable new cars
A claim spreading on social media holds that old cars are being deliberately driven off the road, through fuel changes, regulations, or engineered failure, so that drivers are forced to buy new vehicles packed with cameras, microphones, and always-on data links that track them. The theory braids a real problem into an invented plot. The real problem: a 2023 Mozilla study found all 25 car brands it reviewed failed on privacy, and in 2024 reporting revealed that automakers including General Motors had been quietly selling drivers' data to brokers and insurers, prompting regulatory action. The invented plot: that this surveillance is the hidden purpose of a coordinated campaign to kill off older cars. This file keeps two things apart: connected cars really do collect and sell data; and the claim it rates, that old cars are being deliberately eliminated to force surveillance on everyone. On that claim, the verdict is debunked.
Read the case file →Ozempic and other GLP-1 weight-loss drugs are a covert tool for mass sterilization and depopulation
In a few short years, drugs first developed for type 2 diabetes became the most talked-about medicines in the world, taken by more than one in ten American adults. That speed, layered on real side effects and genuine distrust of the drug industry, gave rise to a darker story: that Ozempic and the other GLP-1 weight-loss drugs are not medicines at all but a covert instrument of mass sterilization and depopulation. The rapid rollout is real. The side effects are real and disclosed. The depopulation scheme is not. The drugs were developed openly over decades of published science, cleared through the public FDA process, and remain under active safety surveillance, and the fertility pattern most often tied to them is not sterility but surprise pregnancy.
Read the case file →Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny was poisoned with a Novichok nerve agent in 2020, an attack that international labs confirmed and that investigative reporting tied to an FSB team
On 20 August 2020, the Russian anti-corruption campaigner and opposition leader Alexei Navalny fell violently ill on a flight from Tomsk to Moscow. The plane made an emergency landing in Omsk, and he was placed in a coma. Two days later he was flown to the Charité hospital in Berlin, where a German military laboratory identified a nerve agent of the Novichok group. Designated laboratories in France and Sweden, and then the OPCW, confirmed the finding. A joint investigation by Bellingcat, The Insider, CNN, and Der Spiegel identified a specialist FSB unit that had tailed Navalny for years, and Navalny published a recorded phone call in which one man described how the poison was applied. This file separates the documented core, a confirmed Novichok poisoning, from the attribution layer, reported here through the OPCW and the investigative reporting rather than asserted as a court's finding. Navalny recovered, returned to Russia in January 2021, was imprisoned, and died in an Arctic penal colony in February 2024.
Read the case file →SARS-CoV-2 escaped from a laboratory in Wuhan rather than emerging naturally, and the truth is being covered up
COVID-19 was first identified in Wuhan, China, in late 2019, the same city as the Wuhan Institute of Virology, one of the world's leading coronavirus research centers. That coincidence sits at the heart of a debate that remains, years later, genuinely unsettled. This case file separates what is documented (an outbreak centered on Wuhan, a major virology lab in the same city, and US intelligence agencies openly divided on the cause) from a legitimate-but-unproven hypothesis (an accidental research-related leak, taken seriously by several US bodies) and from the far stronger conspiracy claims it is often blurred with (a deliberately engineered bioweapon, an intentional release, and an orchestrated global cover-up). The honest status of the origin question is unresolved, and this file does not tilt toward either a lab or a natural origin as settled.
Read the case file →Secret "med bed" machines that instantly cure cancer, regrow lost limbs, and reverse aging already exist and are being hidden from the public by elites and the medical industry
"Med beds" are imaginary healing machines at the center of a QAnon-adjacent conspiracy theory. Believers hold that fully working pods, often described as using 'quantum,' holographic, or reverse-engineered 'alien' technology, can diagnose and cure any illness, regrow amputated limbs, and reverse aging within minutes, and that these devices already exist in secret government or military facilities but are being withheld from the public by elites and a profit-driven medical industry. No such device has ever been demonstrated, approved, or shown to work, and the claims have no basis in physics or biology. This case file treats the technology claim as what it is, false, and focuses on the documented harm: a scam economy that extracts money from sick and grieving people, and the medical danger of patients delaying real treatment while waiting for a miracle that is not coming.
Read the case file →South Korea's April 2024 National Assembly election was electronically rigged
The claim that South Korea's April 2024 National Assembly election, a heavy defeat for President Yoon Suk-yeol's party, was not a genuine result but a theft carried out by hacking the National Election Commission's servers, with North Korean or Chinese hands behind the machines. The vote was real, the opposition win was large and well observed, and every official review, security audit, and court to examine the fraud claims has come back empty. When Yoon cited those same suspicions to declare martial law in December 2024 and sent troops to seize the commission's servers, no evidence emerged, and he was impeached and removed.
Read the case file →The 2020 US presidential election was stolen from Donald Trump through mass fraud
In the days after the 2020 US presidential election, Donald Trump and his allies declared that the vote had been stolen through mass fraud, and 'Stop the Steal' became a movement that fed months of lawsuits, rallies, and, on January 6, 2021, the storming of the US Capitol. This case file separates the record from the claim it rates. It is documented that the election was contested: more than 60 lawsuits were filed, several states recounted or audited, and the result was disputed for months. The claim it rates is the sweeping one, that the election was actually stolen and Trump truly won. On the evidence, that claim is debunked. The Trump-aligned lawsuits lost almost without exception, many for lack of any evidence and several before Trump-appointed judges; federal officials found no sign any vote was altered; the Attorney General said the Justice Department found no outcome-changing fraud; Georgia counted three times including a full hand recount; a partisan Arizona review found no fraud and nudged Biden's margin up; Fox News paid 787.5 million dollars to settle a defamation suit over false machine-fraud claims; and every state certified. The file names no fraud because the record establishes none. Two narrower pieces of this story are treated in their own files: the specific voting-machine allegations in the voting-machine-fraud case, and the 2026 federal seizures in the stolen-election-2026-probe case.
Read the case file →The claim that 5G mobile networks caused or spread COVID-19 is a debunked conspiracy theory that fueled dozens of real-world arson attacks on cell towers
In the first weeks of the COVID-19 pandemic, a claim spread that the new coronavirus had been caused, activated, or transmitted by 5G, the fifth generation of mobile-network technology then rolling out worldwide. Some versions said the virus itself travelled on 5G radio waves; others said 5G radiation weakened immune systems so people fell ill; the most literal insisted the outbreak began in Wuhan because Wuhan had installed 5G. None of it is true, and the reasons are basic physics and epidemiology: a virus cannot ride a radio signal, non-ionizing 5G radiation cannot damage cells the way the theory requires, and the disease spread ferociously in places with no 5G whatsoever. This file focuses on the COVID-19 version of the 5G panic (the site's broader 5g-health-fears entry covers the general radiation worry) and centers two things: why the claim is false, and the concrete damage it did when belief turned into arson.
Read the case file →The H5N1 bird flu outbreak is a manufactured or exaggerated crisis, engineered for profit or control as the next planned pandemic
H5N1 avian influenza is one of the most closely watched viruses in the world, and its spread through poultry, wild birds and, since 2024, US dairy cattle has been real and well documented. Alongside that documented outbreak runs a very different story: that the crisis is manufactured or wildly overhyped, that H5N1 is a laboratory creation or bioweapon, and that a coordinated “plandemic” is being staged to sell vaccines or impose control. This case file separates what is established (a real, long-known virus, real outbreaks, a real 2024 cattle spillover, a small number of real and mostly mild human cases) from a genuinely open science-policy question (whether gain-of-function research on H5N1 should ever have been done) and from the conspiracy claim itself (a deliberately engineered or hoaxed pandemic hidden by a cover-up), which has no established evidentiary support. The file does not endorse skipping public-health precautions, and it does not treat legitimate criticism of preparedness policy as proof of a plot.
Read the case file →The NFL scripts its games and Super Bowls in advance, like professional wrestling, and steers outcomes with favorable officiating
After nearly every high-stakes NFL game, some fans declare online that the result was "scripted," that Las Vegas or the league office writes the outcome in advance and that referees enforce it with convenient penalties. The comparison people reach for is professional wrestling, which openly acknowledges that its winners are predetermined. This case file keeps the documented record (a viral meme with a traceable origin, real blown calls, a 2025 university study of officiating patterns, and a proven 2007 NBA referee betting scandal) apart from the rated claim (that the NFL secretly predetermines who wins). On the rated claim, the verdict is unproven: no script, leak or insider account has ever established that games are fixed, and the theory survives mainly on hindsight and mistrust.
Read the case file →The online claim that dinosaurs never existed and were invented by scientists to prop up evolution is a debunked conspiracy theory contradicted by two centuries of fossil evidence found on every continent
A cluster of viral social-media posts insists that dinosaurs never existed: that the fossils in museums are fabricated props, that paleontology is a closed guild inventing a fake deep past, and that the whole edifice was built to make evolution look true. The most-shared version asks why, if dinosaurs were real, ordinary people are not tripping over bones in their backyards. This file treats that claim as what it is, a debunked piece of science denial, and spends its length on the actual evidence: how fossils form and why they are rare, how bones from different continents and different centuries corroborate each other, how the rocks around them are dated by multiple independent clocks, and why records of people finding “dragon bones” reach back long before modern science existed to allegedly invent them. The interesting question is not whether dinosaurs were real. It is why a claim this easy to refute still spreads.
Read the case file →The retailer Wayfair used its online product listings to traffic children, hiding victims behind overpriced cabinets and pillows named after missing kids
In July 2020 a claim raced across social media that Wayfair, the big online furniture retailer, was secretly trafficking children through its own website. The “evidence” was a set of storage cabinets and other household goods listed at prices that looked absurdly high, each carrying a woman’s first name, which posters said matched the names of missing children. A follow-on step told people to paste the product SKU into certain search engines or stock-photo sites and claimed the results showed photographs of kids. Wayfair said the prices reflected genuine industrial-grade products and briefly removed the listings to re-describe them. Fact-checkers found the name “matches” were coincidences involving common names, that the people named were not missing, and that the SKU trick was a misunderstanding of image search. This file keeps two things apart: what was posted, what Wayfair said, what checkers found; and the claim it rates, that Wayfair ran a trafficking scheme, which is debunked.
Read the case file →The World Economic Forum's 'Great Reset' is a covert plan to abolish private property and impose a global authoritarian government
In June 2020, with the world locked down, the World Economic Forum announced an initiative it called the Great Reset: a call to rebuild the post-pandemic economy along greener, fairer lines. The name was ominous, the language was vague and grand, and it came from an annual gathering of billionaires and heads of state at Davos. Within months a darker reading had taken hold: that the Reset was a covert plan by a global elite to use COVID and climate to abolish private property, end capitalism and national sovereignty, and impose an authoritarian world government. The initiative is real. The book is real. The slogan is real. The plot is not something the evidence can support.
Read the case file →TikTok is a Chinese Communist Party spying and mind-control weapon
The claim that TikTok is a weapon of the Chinese state: that its parent company ByteDance funnels American user data to Beijing and that the Chinese Communist Party secretly tunes the recommendation algorithm to manipulate and brainwash Western users. The data-access and structural-risk concerns behind it are real, officially documented, and serious enough to have produced a US divest-or-ban law. The maximalist version, a proven and operating mind-control operation run on Beijing's orders, has no public evidence behind it.
Read the case file →US elections are systematically rigged through hacked or pre-programmed voting machines that secretly flip votes to change the outcome
The claim is that American elections are not really decided by voters but by machines: that electronic voting equipment is hacked, pre-programmed, or remotely manipulated to secretly flip votes from one candidate to another or to invent votes outright, and that the true tallies are hidden. This case file separates two things that get blurred together. What is documented is that voting machines are computers, that computers can have flaws, and that independent researchers have shown specific vulnerabilities under laboratory conditions; that record is real and it is exactly why the United States relies so heavily on paper ballots and post-election audits. The claim we rate is different and much larger: that any real US election was actually decided by secret machine manipulation. On the evidence, that claim is debunked. Full hand recounts and risk-limiting audits have matched machine counts; federal cybersecurity authorities and bipartisan election officials found no evidence of manipulation changing a result; and courts and defamation settlements established that the most prominent rigging accusations were false. The file draws a firm line between legitimate election-security scrutiny, which is valuable, and the false story that machines quietly chose the winners.
Read the case file →Brigitte Macron, the First Lady of France, was secretly born male and is really her own brother
The false, transphobic claim that Brigitte Macron, the First Lady of France, was born male, is secretly a trans woman, and is in reality her own older brother, Jean-Michel Trogneux. It began in French far-right and conspiracy circles in 2021, went viral through a four-hour YouTube interview, and was carried to a US audience by commentator Candace Owens. There is no truth to it. Brigitte Macron is a woman with a documented life, Jean-Michel Trogneux is a distinct real person, and the smear has drawn defamation and harassment litigation on two continents.
Read the case file →COVID-19 mRNA vaccines are secretly causing a hidden wave of sudden deaths that health authorities are concealing
“Died suddenly” is the slogan of a movement that reads a hidden mass-casualty event into the ordinary background of human death. Its adherents point to viral clips of young people collapsing, to embalmers who report strange white clots, and to raw counts from open reporting systems and insurance and excess-mortality data, and they conclude that COVID-19 mRNA vaccines are killing people on a large scale while officials cover it up. This case file keeps the record apart from the claim it rates. What is on the record: excess deaths during the pandemic were real, and some vaccine side effects are real and monitored. The claim we rate: that the vaccines are the concealed cause of a wave of sudden deaths. Examined against the evidence, that claim does not hold, and the verdict is debunked.
Read the case file →Haitian President Jovenel Moïse was assassinated in 2021 by a team of mostly Colombian mercenaries recruited through a Florida security firm, with the masterminds who ordered and financed it still contested
Shortly after 1 a.m. on 7 July 2021, a heavily armed team entered the hillside residence of Haitian President Jovenel Moïse in Pèlerin 5, above Pétion-Ville, some of them shouting in English that this was a US Drug Enforcement Administration operation. They shot Moïse a dozen times and wounded his wife, Martine. Haitian forces killed three of the attackers and captured most of the rest within days; the great majority were former Colombian Army soldiers, recruited through a Miami-area security company called CTU. Prosecutions followed on two tracks. In Haiti, roughly twenty people including seventeen Colombians face charges; in Miami, the US Department of Justice charged eleven, won several guilty pleas and life sentences, and in May 2026 secured a jury verdict against four more. This file separates the documented killing and mercenary operation, which the courts have established, from the still-contested question of who ordered and paid for it.
Read the case file →Insects are being put into everyday foods without telling anyone, as part of a coordinated plan to move the public off meat
Every few months a video circulates showing insects being ground into something ordinary: flour, protein bars, instant noodles. The accompanying claim is that this is happening to the food already in your cupboard, that it is deliberate, and that nobody is being told. The underlying facts are more interesting than either the claim or a flat dismissal of it. Insect protein has been authorised for sale in the European Union, species by species, through a public regulatory process with named applicant companies, and cricket powder is an ingredient in some products. But the regulation that permits it is also the regulation that requires it to be declared, with the species named and an allergen warning attached, because EFSA found insect proteins can affect people with existing shellfish and dust-mite allergies. So the rating here turns on one word in the claim. Insects in food: documented. Insects in food covertly, as part of a programme: contradicted by the paperwork the claim itself points at. And one narrower worry, about labels that satisfy the law in Latin, survives both, having been raised by a fact-checker rather than by anyone selling the conspiracy.
Read the case file →Most of the internet is now bots and AI, not real people
The claim that the internet is now mostly fake: dominated by bots, AI-generated content, and algorithmic engagement farming rather than real people. Security researchers really have measured automated traffic overtaking human traffic; what remains unproven is the theory's stronger claim that this is a deliberate, coordinated replacement of humanity online.
Read the case file →Schools are putting litter boxes in bathrooms for students who identify as cats
Beginning in late 2021, a rumor spread that schools were installing litter boxes in bathrooms to accommodate students who identify as cats. It moved from a Michigan school-board meeting to Facebook to a viral Twitter account, and by the 2022 midterms at least twenty candidates and officials were repeating it. Every school district named has denied it, fact-checkers across the spectrum have found no evidence, and none has ever surfaced. The kernel of truth is unrelated and grim: some classrooms stock cat litter in emergency buckets for use during lockdowns, a fact about school-shooting drills that got laundered into a culture-war story. The claim is a debunked hoax.
Read the case file →The 2021 US infrastructure law secretly mandates a remote government “kill switch” in every new car
In November 2021, Congress passed the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, and buried in its hundreds of pages was Section 24220, an instruction to federal regulators to require new cars to include technology that can detect an impaired driver. A viral retelling quickly recast that provision as something far more sinister: a secret mandate for a remote “kill switch” that would let the government or police turn off your car, watch where you go, and harvest your data. This case file separates two things that are constantly fused. What is on the record is that the impaired-driving mandate is real and its final technical form is still being written by NHTSA. The claim we rate, that the law creates a remotely operated government kill switch with police access to your vehicle and data, is false: fact-checkers who read the statute found an in-car detection system, no remote shutoff, and no police access. The privacy unease underneath the panic is not baseless, because modern connected cars genuinely collect and sell enormous amounts of driver data. But that real problem is a separate matter from the specific kill-switch claim, which does not hold up.
Read the case file →The swabs and brushes used in medical tests are sterilised with a cancer-causing gas, so having a cervical smear or a Covid test exposes you to a carcinogen
In August 2026 posts began circulating claiming the brush used in a cervical smear test is sterilised in a cancer-causing chemical, and that having the test is therefore dangerous. Full Fact checked it on 17 August. The starting fact is true: ethylene oxide is used to sterilise swabs, speculums and a great deal of other medical equipment, and overexposure to the gas really can cause cancer. The conclusion does not follow, and the people who regulate the devices say so. A spokesperson for the Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency told Full Fact there is no credible evidence linking the swabs used in cervical smear tests to cancer. Professor Andrea Sella of University College London has described the process as exposing the material to the gas for seconds or minutes and then removing it entirely before packaging, leaving nothing behind. This is not a new claim; the same argument was made about Covid-19 lateral flow tests in 2021 and answered then, including in a Freedom of Information response from the MHRA that is unusually useful to anyone who wants to check for themselves. Keep two things separate: that ethylene oxide is hazardous in occupational quantities, which is documented and uncontested, and the claim this file rates, that a sterilised swab endangers the patient. Nothing here is medical advice.
Read the case file →Ukraine hosts secret US-run bioweapons labs developing pathogens to attack Russia
The claim that a network of laboratories in Ukraine is secretly run by the United States to develop biological weapons, in some tellings pathogens engineered to target Slavs or ethnic Russians, or diseases meant to spread via migratory birds, bats, and mosquitoes. Underneath the story sits a real and documented program: US-funded public-health and biosafety labs, owned and operated by Ukraine, that secure and study dangerous pathogens to prevent outbreaks. The claim we rate, that these are covert offensive weapons factories, does not survive contact with the evidence and traces to a decades-old Russian disinformation playbook.
Read the case file →When a famous person dies suddenly, the COVID-19 vaccine is retroactively named as the cause
There is a sentence that gets written every time somebody famous dies without warning: they had just been vaccinated. It arrives fast, usually before any official cause exists, and it always arrives from a source nobody can check. This file keeps two things apart. On one side, sudden celebrity deaths are real, and rare vaccine side effects are real and are tracked openly by regulators. On the other, the claim rated here: that a COVID-19 vaccine caused these particular deaths. In every case examined, that claim was assembled after the fact, and in the case documented most closely below it can be traced to a single anonymous quote published while the man was still alive. The verdict is debunked.
Read the case file →'2000 Mules' proved thousands of paid operatives illegally stuffed ballot drop boxes in 2020
In May 2022, conservative filmmaker Dinesh D'Souza and the activist group True the Vote released '2000 Mules,' which claimed that anonymized cellphone geolocation data, combined with drop-box surveillance video, proved that thousands of paid operatives had illegally collected and deposited ballots across five swing states in 2020. The film became a rallying point for people who believed the election was stolen. Its method does not hold up: experts and the Associated Press explained that phone-location data is far too imprecise to show that a device visited a particular drop box, the surveillance clips depicted lawful ballot returns rather than crimes, and not a single 'mule' was ever identified or charged. Georgia's State Election Board dismissed the related ballot-harvesting complaint, and True the Vote later admitted in court it had no underlying names or proof. In 2024 the film's distributor retracted it, pulled the book, and apologized to a Georgia man it had falsely cast as a criminal. This file separates the documented record (the film was made, then retracted) from the rated claim (that it proved mass fraud), which is debunked.
Read the case file →AI labs have secretly already built artificial general intelligence or conscious machines and are hiding it
As AI systems improved rapidly between 2022 and 2026, a recurring suspicion took hold: that a frontier lab has already crossed the line to artificial general intelligence, or built a genuinely conscious machine, and is deliberately concealing it to avoid panic, regulation, market disruption, or the loss of a strategic edge. This case file keeps two things apart. What is on the record is real and interesting: a Google engineer publicly claimed a chatbot was sentient, a viral meme had executives winking about AGI 'achieved internally,' and serious researchers now debate machine consciousness in peer-reviewed venues. The claim we rate is narrower and different: that the achievement has actually happened in secret and is being hidden. On the evidence available, that specific claim is unproven.
Read the case file →BRICS nations have a coordinated secret plan to imminently kill the US dollar and engineer a collapse of Americans' savings
For years a story has circulated that the BRICS nations, Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa and a widening circle of new members, are about to pull off a coordinated strike on the US dollar: a new gold-backed BRICS currency, a sudden loss of reserve status, and an engineered collapse that vaporizes the value of dollars sitting in ordinary Americans' bank accounts. Something real sits underneath it. De-dollarization is a genuine, gradual trend: sanctions have pushed Russia and others toward local-currency trade, China is building payment rails outside the dollar system, and the dollar's reserve share has slipped over twenty years. But the leap from that slow, uneven diversification to a secret plan for an imminent, deliberate wipeout of your savings is not one the evidence supports. There is no common BRICS currency, no launch date, and no summit document that commits to killing the dollar. The trend is worth watching. The engineered-collapse plot is not what is happening.
Read the case file →Iran's schoolgirls were the targets of a deliberate, coordinated poisoning campaign
From late 2022, thousands of schoolgirls across dozens of Iranian cities reported sudden illness at school: nausea, breathlessness, dizziness, numbness, and strange odors. Coming amid the woman-led protests that followed Mahsa Amini's death, many Iranians concluded that girls were being deliberately poisoned to frighten them out of the classroom. Iranian authorities cycled through denial, talk of a 'hostile plot,' arrests, and claims of stress and mass hysteria. Independent experts split between a real low-grade chemical irritant and mass sociogenic illness. The opacity of the official response made the truth impossible to nail down, which is why the coordinated-poisoning claim, however plausible to many, stays unproven.
Read the case file →Jean-Luc Brunel was murdered in his prison cell to keep him from testifying about Jeffrey Epstein
Jean-Luc Brunel (1946-2022) was a French modeling agent who spent decades in the industry and later became one of Jeffrey Epstein's closest associates, building the MC2 agency with Epstein's money. Models had accused him of drugging and sexual assault as far back as a 1988 CBS 60 Minutes report, twenty years before Epstein's first conviction. Arrested in France in December 2020 and indicted for the rape of minors, Brunel was found hanged in his cell at La Sante prison in Paris on 19 February 2022, before any trial. A judicial inquiry ruled it a suicide; his lawyers contested the circumstances. This case file separates that record from the claim it rates: that he was murdered to keep him silent. Brunel died before trial and was never convicted; the allegations against him remain allegations.
Read the case file →Poland has secretly lost its sovereignty, become a puppet of the EU, Germany, and Washington, and is being turned into a NATO forward base to launch an aggressive war on Russia
One of the most durable Russian influence narratives aimed at Poland holds that the country has quietly forfeited its independence: that it is a "puppet" or "51st state" run from Washington, Brussels, or Berlin, and that it is being converted into a NATO staging ground to fight an aggressive, suicidal war against Russia. In this telling, Poland's own defensive programs, its East Shield (Tarcza Wschod) fortifications along the borders with Belarus and Kaliningrad, and NATO reinforcement exercises such as Amber Shock, are recast as proof of warmongering that will get Poles used as "cannon fodder." Reputable analysts tell a very different story. The EU's EUvsDisinfo project catalogues the "lost sovereignty" theme as a core pro-Kremlin narrative; the Casimir Pulaski Foundation, Demagog, and Propastop document how it is deployed against Poland specifically. This case file treats the sovereignty-loss and warmonger framing as what those analysts describe, a disinformation narrative, and lays out why the underlying facts do not support it. It reports the claim to rebut it, never to endorse it.
Read the case file →Shinzo Abe's assassination was staged or an inside job, not the homemade-gun shooting that police described
Shinzo Abe, Japan's longest-serving prime minister, was shot dead on 8 July 2022 while giving a campaign speech outside Yamato-Saidaiji Station in Nara. His attacker, Tetsuya Yamagami, used a bulky homemade gun and was tackled at the scene; he told police he blamed the Unification Church for bankrupting his family through his mother's donations and targeted Abe over the former leader's perceived ties to the group. That account was tested at trial, where Yamagami pleaded guilty and was sentenced to life in prison. Alongside it, a set of conspiracy theories spread almost immediately: that the killing was staged, that the crude homemade weapon could not have been the murder weapon, or that a concealed sniper or the state itself did the killing and Yamagami is a scapegoat. This file separates the well-established record from those claims, which the evidence does not support.
Read the case file →Storm-1516 is a Russia-linked disinformation operation that manufactures fake videos and cloned news sites to smear Western and Ukrainian figures
Storm-1516 is the tracking name for a prolific Russia-linked disinformation operation that mass-produces fabricated content: staged videos of supposed whistleblowers and pseudo-journalists, cloned pages dressed up as local TV stations, and AI-generated "scandals" aimed at discrediting Ukraine and Western leaders. Researchers first mapped its output in late 2023, Microsoft assigned the Storm-1516 label in April 2024, and by early 2026 the Microsoft Threat Analysis Center was counting more than a thousand synthetic videos in a single quarter. Its hoaxes are engineered to launder from anonymous "burner" accounts through fringe sites and paid influencers until real politicians and mainstream outlets repeat them. Unlike most files in this archive, the rated claim here is true: the operation is real, extensively documented, and attributed to Russia-linked actors by reputable researchers and Western governments.
Read the case file →Supermarkets systematically overstate the weight printed on meat and produce labels, quietly overcharging every customer by a few cents at a time as deliberate policy
Someone weighs a packet of mince at home, finds it lighter than the label, photographs the scale, and posts it. The replies fill with people saying they have noticed the same thing for years. From there it becomes a claim about the system: that supermarkets shave a little off every weighted package, that it is deliberate, and that it amounts to an enormous transfer of money nobody notices because no individual loss is worth complaining about. The reason this file exists is that the foundation is real in a way conspiracy claims almost never are. Walmart paid 45 million dollars in 2024 to settle a class action alleging exactly this about meat, poultry, pork, seafood and bagged citrus. The part that gets dropped in the retelling is that Walmart denied the allegations throughout and denies them still, and that a settlement establishes no wrongdoing. So this file separates a documented, expensively litigated dispute from the general claim built on top of it, and it is a rare case where the reader can go and check the underlying question personally.
Read the case file →The “15-minute city” is a plan to confine residents to zones and ration their movement
Urban planners promote the “15-minute city” as shorthand for a simple goal: shops, schools, clinics, and jobs close enough to reach on foot or by bike. Beginning in late 2022, that goal was recast online as its opposite, a scheme to seal people inside their neighborhoods, ration car trips with permits, and track every movement by camera, all in the name of climate control. The confinement never appears in any actual plan; the fear was built by fusing a proximity concept with a real, contested Oxford traffic-filter trial and a mistranslated global-cities report.
Read the case file →The 2022 claim that Google's LaMDA chatbot had become sentient is not supported by the evidence, and was rejected by Google's own review and by AI researchers
In June 2022 a Google engineer named Blake Lemoine went public with an extraordinary claim: LaMDA, the company's large conversational language model, had become sentient, a self-aware being with feelings and a fear of being switched off. He supported it with edited transcripts of his chats with the system and argued it deserved rights. Google, which had already placed him on leave, said its experts had reviewed the evidence and found the claim wholly unfounded; it fired him in July 2022. AI researchers were nearly unanimous that a language model producing fluent, emotive text is not thereby conscious: it predicts plausible words from statistical patterns in its training data, an effect the field had already named the stochastic parrot problem. This file reports the episode as a debunked sentience claim while taking seriously the deeper, unresolved question of machine consciousness that it forced into public view.
Read the case file →The 2022 Itaewon Halloween crowd crush was staged, or was caused by drugs, spilled oil, or a gas attack rather than crowd density
In the days after 159 people were killed in a Halloween crowd crush in Seoul's Itaewon district on 29 October 2022, a set of online claims recast the disaster as something other than what investigators documented: that it was staged with crisis actors and fake bodies, or that the real cause was partygoers on drugs, cooking oil spilled to make the slope slippery, or a covert gas or chemical attack. The rated claim is that hidden alternative cause. It is debunked. Underneath sits a genuine, painful record: a preventable crush, official failures that a police investigation laid out, and grieving families who were then abused online with these very theories.
Read the case file →The 2022 Nord Stream pipeline blasts were a covert state sabotage operation whose real perpetrator is being concealed
In the early hours of 26 September 2022, underwater explosions tore open the Nord Stream 1 and Nord Stream 2 gas pipelines beneath the Baltic Sea near the Danish island of Bornholm. Seismographs recorded the blasts, gas boiled to the surface for days, and investigators from three countries found residue of explosives. That it was deliberate sabotage is established. Who ordered it is not. The vacuum filled quickly with rival state-actor theories: a pro-Ukrainian operation, a Russian false flag, a covert US strike. This case file keeps the settled fact (sabotage) apart from the contested claim (attribution plus an alleged cover-up), and weighs what each official investigation actually found.
Read the case file →The Bucha massacre was staged by Ukraine, with bodies planted after Russian forces withdrew
After Russian forces retreated from the Kyiv suburb of Bucha at the end of March 2022, journalists and Ukrainian authorities found the streets strewn with the bodies of murdered civilians, some with their hands bound, many shot at close range. Within days Russia's Ministry of Defence declared the scene a fabrication: the bodies, it said, were actors or corpses planted after Russian units had left, a 'staged performance' by Kyiv to smear Moscow. That denial is the claim rated here, and it is debunked. Satellite imagery, forensic pathology, on-the-ground reporting, and multiple independent visual investigations place the bodies in Bucha's streets while Russia still controlled the town, and identify the Russian units responsible.
Read the case file →The drones filmed dropping fire onto forests are being used to start wildfires deliberately, and the footage proves the fires are being set from the air
A video circulates whenever a fire season turns severe: a drone flying low over woodland, dropping small objects, and flames rising behind it. The caption says these machines are used specifically to start fires, that a single flight can burn dozens of acres, and that this is how the fires currently on the news are being set. The video is genuine and nothing about it has been manipulated. What has been swapped is the purpose. The aircraft is an aerial ignition drone, sold to fire services to drop ignition spheres and light small, controlled fires ahead of an advancing wildfire so that it runs out of fuel, a technique long flown from helicopters and now run more safely from the ground. Maldita.es rated the claim false in 2022 and again when it returned in July 2026. This file rates the claim, not the fires: whether any particular fire was deliberately set is a matter for investigators, and arson prosecutions are a real feature of European fire seasons. What is not supported is that this device, or this footage, is evidence of it.
Read the case file →The United States engineered the 2022 ouster of Pakistani PM Imran Khan through a secret diplomatic cable, the 'cypher'
In March 2022, weeks before he lost a no-confidence vote, Prime Minister Imran Khan told a rally that a foreign power, which he soon named as the United States, was conspiring to remove him, and he waved a paper he called proof: a classified diplomatic cable, the 'cypher.' A real cable does exist, and the text later published by The Intercept records a senior U.S. official expressing displeasure with Khan's neutrality on the Ukraine war and indicating that relations would warm if he were gone. What remains contested is the leap from that documented displeasure to the claim that Washington orchestrated his removal. Pakistan's parliament, army, and coalition politics drove the ouster, and Pakistan's own official bodies rejected the conspiracy finding.
Read the case file →The viral claim that the James Webb Space Telescope disproved the Big Bang is false: its surprisingly bright early galaxies challenged some galaxy-formation models but remain consistent with the expanding-universe Big Bang framework
In July 2022 the James Webb Space Telescope released its first deep images of the early universe, and within weeks a claim spread that the new data had “disproved” or “killed” the Big Bang. It had not. JWST did find something surprising: galaxies in the first few hundred million years after the Big Bang that looked brighter, more numerous, and more mature than several galaxy-formation models had predicted. That is a challenge to models of how galaxies grow, not to the expanding-universe framework itself. The “Big Bang is dead” narrative was driven chiefly by Eric Lerner, an independent researcher who has promoted plasma cosmology as an alternative since 1991, and by his misuse of a candid quote from astronomer Allison Kirkpatrick, who publicly rejected the interpretation and affirmed that JWST's findings support the Big Bang. This file explains what JWST actually observed, why it never threatened the theory's core evidence, and how the surprise was absorbed into standard cosmology.
Read the case file →Western weapons sent to Ukraine are being systematically stolen and trafficked into criminal and terrorist networks across Europe, Africa, and the Middle East
One of the most persistently deployed Russian narratives about the war in Ukraine holds that the Western weapons flowing to Kyiv are being stolen, resold, and trafficked at scale: turning up on darknet markets, in European gang violence, in African and Middle Eastern conflicts, even in the hands of terrorists. Since 2022 the West has indeed sent large quantities of arms to Ukraine, and tracking their end-use in an active war zone is genuinely hard, which is the kernel the story exploits. But the sweeping claim of a diversion crisis has never been substantiated. The EU's EUvsDisinfo project catalogues variant after variant; the US Defense Department's inspector general reported no evidence of systemic diversion; the State Department stood up an end-use monitoring plan; and the Global Initiative Against Transnational Organized Crime, which monitors illicit arms flows, found no organized, large-scale movement of Western weapons out of Ukraine, with most illegal trade involving Soviet-era "trophy" arms handled by individuals rather than NATO-supplied kit. This file treats the systemic-diversion narrative as what those bodies describe, a documented information operation inflating a real but limited problem, and lays out why the evidence does not support it. It reports the claim to rebut it, never to endorse it.
Read the case file →A major AI lab has already secretly achieved AGI and is hiding it
The belief that a leading AI lab has quietly built artificial general intelligence, or even a conscious machine, and is concealing it from the public, regulators, or markets to avoid panic, regulation, or the loss of a competitive edge. It reads the 2023 OpenAI board crisis, the 'Q*' rumors, and executives' own dramatic statements as signs that a hidden threshold has already been crossed. The rapid progress is real; the secret breakthrough is not established.
Read the case file →California banned Skittles, candies are being pulled from shelves, and Big Food and the FDA are covering up that artificial dyes are secretly poisoning people
In 2023 a wave of headlines and posts announced that California had 'banned Skittles,' and the claim has resurfaced with every food-dye story since. It is not true. California's Food Safety Act (AB 418) bans four additives, not any candy, and pulled nothing from shelves; the popular 'Skittles ban' nickname is a holdover from an early draft that once listed titanium dioxide, an ingredient later dropped from the bill. Around that false headline grew a larger claim: that candies are being yanked from stores and that Big Food and the FDA are hiding the fact that artificial dyes are secretly poisoning people. This file separates the two. The real regulatory record is public and substantial: California restricted four additives (2023) and six school-food dyes (2024), the FDA revoked Red No. 3 in January 2025, and federal officials moved to phase out petroleum-based dyes in 2025-2026. The science on some dyes, especially behavioral effects in children, is genuinely debated in the open. None of that is a secret poisoning or a cover-up, and none of it banned Skittles. This is not medical or dietary advice.
Read the case file →Japan's release of treated water from the wrecked Fukushima plant is poisoning the Pacific with deadly radiation
The claim that Japan is dumping 'deadly' radioactive water into the Pacific from the destroyed Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant, poisoning seafood, killing marine life, and irradiating neighboring countries, often illustrated with 'glowing water' and 'dead fish' footage and nicknamed 'Godzilla water.' Underneath it sits a genuine, contested decision to discharge treated water, real public anxiety, and a real diplomatic fight. The specific claim laid over those facts, that the release is a deadly poisoning of the ocean, does not survive contact with the measurements.
Read the case file →Legal changes to securities ownership mean investors no longer own their stocks and bonds, so central bankers and secured creditors will lawfully seize everything in an engineered crash
"The Great Taking" is the claim, laid out in a 2023 book and documentary by former hedge-fund manager David Rogers Webb, that you no longer truly own the stocks and bonds in your brokerage account. Webb argues that revisions to Uniform Commercial Code Article 8 in the 1990s replaced ownership with a weaker 'security entitlement,' and that this was engineered over decades so that in a deliberate financial collapse a protected class of secured creditors and central bankers can lawfully seize all pledged securities and wipe out ordinary investors. This file separates the record from the claim it rates. The plumbing Webb describes is real: modern securities are held in pooled, book-entry custody under a depository nominee, and 'security entitlement' is the actual legal term. But the seizure conclusion does not follow from the law. Primary sources, UCC 8-503, federal customer-asset segregation rules, and the SIPA/SIPC liquidation regime, are built specifically to keep customer securities out of the hands of a failed broker's creditors. Rated as a conspiracy theory, it is debunked.
Read the case file →Mitch McConnell is secretly dead, brain-dead, or incapacitated, and his condition is being covered up
In the summer of 2023, Mitch McConnell twice froze mid-sentence in front of cameras, unable to speak for many seconds. In June 2026 the 84-year-old senator entered a hospital after a fall, and for roughly a month his office declined to say why, offering only that he continued to improve. Into that silence rushed a familiar kind of theory: that McConnell was actually dead, brain-dead, or so incapacitated that aides were propping up a shell and hiding it from the public, some versions claiming a body double or an AI-generated photo. This case file keeps two things apart: on one side the real health scares, a real hospitalization, and a genuinely thin flow of information; on the other the claim we actually rate, that his death or replacement is being concealed. On the conspiracy, the evidence does not hold up: McConnell reappeared with a statement, a photo, and a third-party account of a phone call, and explained the hospitalization as a fall and mild pneumonia. The verdict is debunked, with the legitimate transparency question left standing on its own.
Read the case file →The 2023 Chinese spy balloon was not what officials said: it was deliberately let in, a distraction, or something other than a balloon
For a week in early 2023, a Chinese balloon the height of the Statue of Liberty drifted across North America while millions watched, until an F-22 shot it down off the Carolina coast. The documented event is remarkable enough on its own: a foreign surveillance craft crossing the United States, tracked in public, then downed and recovered. Around that hard core grew a cloud of alternative readings. Some hold the balloon was deliberately waved through as part of a scheme; others that its very public transit was a distraction from something else; others that the object was not really a balloon but a suppressed craft or weapon. This file keeps the documented balloon separate from those embellishments, and takes the real open questions seriously without endorsing the conspiracy frame.
Read the case file →The 2023 Lahaina wildfire was not an accident but a directed-energy weapon strike, set to clear land for an elite 'smart city'
On 8 August 2023, a wildfire destroyed most of Lahaina on Maui and killed about 100 people, the deadliest wildfire in the United States in more than a century. Within days, a claim spread that the fire was no accident: that it had been ignited by a directed-energy weapon fired from space or aircraft, and deliberately set to clear the land for a corporate or elite 'smart city.' This case file separates two things. The disaster and the failures around it are real and painful; the directed-energy story is not supported by any evidence, misreads the physics, and rests on photographs that turned out to come from other places and years. The official origin-and-cause investigation by the Maui Fire Department and the federal ATF, along with the Hawaii Attorney General's phased Fire Safety Research Institute reports, traces the fire to downed and re-energized power lines in extreme drought and powerful winds, worsened by warning and response failures. We rate the directed-energy claim debunked, and treat the looser 'land grab' claim separately as unproven.
Read the case file →The 2023 Titan submersible implosion was staged, sabotaged, or a disaster whose true cause is being concealed
On 18 June 2023 the submersible Titan, operated by the US company OceanGate, lost contact with its surface ship about an hour and three-quarters into a dive to the wreck of the Titanic. Four days of round-the-clock search coverage followed. On 22 June the US Coast Guard announced that a debris field near the Titanic was consistent with a catastrophic implosion of the pressure hull, and that all five people aboard, including OceanGate chief executive Stockton Rush, had died. The established record is damning on its own terms: the hull was an experimental carbon-fiber design, the vessel was never classed or certified, and multiple experts and a former employee had warned for years that it was unsafe. This case file keeps that documented negligence apart from the rated conspiracy claim, that the implosion was staged, sabotaged, or covered up, and weighs what the physical evidence and the official investigation actually show. On that claim, the verdict is debunked.
Read the case file →The recording proves what they really said: leaked audio of a public figure is authentic, because you can hear their own voice saying it
For most of the last century a recording of somebody's voice was close to conclusive. Tape could be spliced and quotes could be trimmed, but the voice itself was the part nobody could fake. That is no longer true, and the change arrived faster than the habit of trusting it could adjust. Two days before Slovakia's 2023 parliamentary election, audio circulated that seemed to capture a party leader and a journalist planning to rig the vote; both said immediately it was fabricated, AFP found numerous signs of manipulation, and it went out during a 48-hour moratorium when Slovak media and politicians are required to stay quiet. Four months later thousands of New Hampshire households answered the phone to an AI-generated Joe Biden telling them not to bother voting in the primary. By August 2026 the technique had been simplified: instead of generating a whole recording, fabricated speech is now dropped onto authentic video, so the footage passes every check while saying something its subject never said. This file rates the assumption underneath all of it, that hearing the voice settles the question.
Read the case file →The viral "floating brain" / "jellyfish" UAP clip from the Pentagon's July 2026 release shows a genuine non-human craft performing impossible maneuvers
On 10 July 2026 the US Department of War released its fourth batch of declassified Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena files through the Presidential Unsealing and Reporting System for UAP Encounters (PURSUE), housed at war.gov/ufo: about 40 records, including 19 videos. One of them, a 2020 encounter over the Atlantic Ocean, showed a blob-shaped object with narrower strands dangling beneath it, and observers quickly connected it to the long-rumored "jellyfish" UAP. Within a day a version had spread across social media in which the object appears to shape-shift and then snap into a sharp, high-speed maneuver before accelerating away. That striking version is a fabrication: a social-media user ran the authentic clip through AI enhancement, inventing motion the original does not contain. The authentic footage shows an object drifting at wind speed, described in the accompanying report as roughly 12 to 15 feet tall and "traveling with the wind," consistent with a balloon or a military aerostat, and it closely matches earlier jellyfish footage from Iraq that skeptics, notably Mick West, had already explained as balloon-like objects moving with the wind. This file keeps two things apart: a genuine government release did happen; and the claim it rates, that the viral clip proves a maneuvering non-human craft, which is debunked.
Read the case file →Boeing had two of its safety whistleblowers killed to silence them in 2024
In the spring of 2024, two men who had blown the whistle on aircraft quality problems died within weeks of each other. On 9 March, John Barnett, a former Boeing quality manager who had spent years warning about the 787 Dreamliner, was found dead in his truck in a Charleston hotel car park during a break in the deposition for his own retaliation lawsuit. On 30 April, Joshua Dean, a former quality auditor at Boeing supplier Spirit AeroSystems, died after a sudden and aggressive infection. The proximity of the two deaths lit a viral claim: that Boeing was silencing its critics. This case file keeps two things apart: two deaths, with two very different causes on one side; and on the other the claim it weighs, that Boeing had these men killed. The deaths are real and were a genuine loss; the assassination claim, set against what investigators actually found, is unproven.
Read the case file →Bovaer, the methane-reducing cattle feed additive, poisons milk and meat and is part of a Bill Gates depopulation plot
The claim that Bovaer, a real cattle feed additive designed to reduce the methane cows belch, secretly contaminates dairy and beef, causes cancer or infertility in the people who consume them, and is a tool in a Bill Gates 'depopulation' or climate agenda. Real facts sit underneath the panic: Bovaer exists, it is approved and rolling out, and Gates did fund a rival methane startup. The claim we rate, that the milk on the shelf is poisoning you by design, does not survive contact with how the additive actually works or what regulators found.
Read the case file →Coca-Cola's personalised can tool blocks Christian phrases like 'Jesus is King' while cheerfully printing 'Satan is good', proof that the company censors one faith and not its opposite
A man filmed himself typing phrases into Coca-Cola's personalised can website. 'Jesus is King' was refused. 'The devil is king' and 'Satan is good', he showed, went through. The video spread, conservative outlets picked it up, and the conclusion drew itself: a corporation had taken a side. The record is more boring and more interesting than that. Coca-Cola does block religious phrases, which is a real thing to object to and this file treats it as one. But it blocks them in every direction, and independent testing has now confirmed that twice. In 2024 Snopes put the same tool through its paces and found Jesus, Satan and Allah refused, along with numerous Biblical names, the word Pope, and political slogans for both presidential tickets. The 2026 video turns on a gap the claim never mentions: what appears in the preview screen is not what gets printed. Coca-Cola says a technical fault let restricted words show in preview, that every order is manually reviewed afterwards, and that such cans would have been cancelled and refunded. It has disabled the preview and paused new orders while it fixes it.
Read the case file →Earth will lose gravity for 7 seconds on August 12, 2026, as revealed by a leaked NASA 'Project Anchor' document
A viral social-media claim holds that Earth will lose gravity for roughly seven seconds on August 12, 2026, at a precise time (often given as 14:33 UTC), and that a secret NASA document titled 'Project Anchor,' supposedly leaked in November 2024 with a budget in the tens of millions or billions, shows the agency is bracing for the anomaly. None of it holds up. No such NASA project or document exists, NASA has denied the claim, and gravity, a product of mass, cannot simply turn off. The only genuine event on the date is a total solar eclipse, unrelated to gravity. This case file separates the established record (a spreading hoax, a real eclipse) from the claim it rates (a coming gravitational blackout), which is debunked.
Read the case file →Everyday stress gives you 'cortisol face,' a puffy, round face fixable with supplements and cortisol-lowering routines
Scroll wellness TikTok and you will meet a diagnosis that no doctor gave you: 'cortisol face.' The pitch is that the stress of ordinary life keeps your cortisol chronically high, and that high cortisol puffs your face into a round, swollen shape you can supposedly reverse with supplements, 'cortisol cocktails,' cold plunges, and calming routines. The trend rests on a real medical fact and then stretches it past breaking. Pathologically high cortisol really can round the face: that is the 'moon face' of Cushing's syndrome or of long-term steroid medication, both uncommon and diagnosed by a clinician. But dermatologists and endocrinologists are consistent that 'cortisol face' is not a recognized diagnosis, that everyday stress does not raise cortisol high enough to cause it, and that most facial puffiness comes from salt, sleep, alcohol, allergies, or normal overnight fluid shifts. This file separates the real condition from the viral version, and explains why the trend is good for supplement sales and bad as self-diagnosis. It is not medical advice.
Read the case file →OpenAI whistleblower Suchir Balaji was murdered to silence him, and the suicide ruling is a cover-up
Suchir Balaji (1998–2024) spent about four years as a researcher at OpenAI, helped build the systems behind ChatGPT, then left the company and went public in October 2024 with a detailed argument that OpenAI had violated United States copyright law. One month later, on 26 November 2024, he was found dead in his San Francisco apartment of a gunshot wound to the head. The San Francisco Police Department reported no evidence of foul play and the Chief Medical Examiner ruled the death a suicide, a conclusion the office reaffirmed in 2025. His parents dispute the ruling, commissioned a private second autopsy they say found an atypical trajectory, and argue he was murdered to stop his testimony. This case file keeps the record separate from the claim it rates. The record is a young whistleblower found dead and officially ruled a suicide. The claim is that he was murdered and the ruling faked.
Read the case file →Sean Combs's case conceals a hidden network: a secret list of complicit elites, blackmail tapes implicating the famous, and an Epstein-style cover-up
Sean “Diddy” Combs, the music executive and producer, was arrested in September 2024 and charged in federal court in Manhattan. After a 2025 trial, a jury convicted him on two counts of transportation to engage in prostitution under the Mann Act and acquitted him of the most serious charges, racketeering conspiracy and sex trafficking; he was sentenced to 50 months and is appealing. He also faces dozens of civil lawsuits containing allegations that remain unproven, which he denies. Running alongside those real proceedings is a distinct set of conspiracy theories: that Combs kept a secret list of powerful, famous people complicit in his alleged abuse, that he secretly recorded encounters to use as blackmail over elites, and that courts or powerful interests are covering up a protected network in the way critics believe Epstein's associates were shielded. This case file separates the documented layer, a set of charges, a split verdict, a sentence, and a body of unproven civil allegations, from those claims, which have not been substantiated. It names no other person, because no such person has been established.
Read the case file →Taylor Swift is a secret Pentagon psyop and the 2024 Super Bowl was rigged to boost a political endorsement
In early 2024 a strange idea bubbled up in political media and online: that Taylor Swift, then the most famous pop star on the planet, was secretly a Pentagon asset, that the NFL had rigged the playoffs and Super Bowl LVIII so she could beam a political endorsement to a captive audience, and that her whole career was an engineered government operation. It is a debunked meme, not a real allegation against Swift or anyone else. The Department of Defense denied it outright and with a wink. The Super Bowl was a real game the Kansas City Chiefs won in overtime. Swift did later endorse Kamala Harris, in September 2024, after Joe Biden had dropped out, which is exactly the kind of thing famous people have always done. This case file lays out how the meme spread and why the mundane explanation is the correct one.
Read the case file →The '4 a.m. club': that reality split on election night 2024 and Kamala Harris won in the true timeline
The '4 a.m. club' is a mystical, left-leaning TikTok movement holding that around 4 a.m. on 6 November 2024, election night, reality 'split' into two timelines: a 'true' one in which Kamala Harris won the presidency, and the 'wrong' one we are supposedly stuck in, where Donald Trump won. Adherents say they woke at that hour with a shared sense of dread or a conviction that Harris had actually won, and that through manifestation and 'reality shifting' the group can 'jump' back to the correct reality. Widely described as a left-wing mirror of QAnon, it grows out of the same online soil as manifestation, reality-shifting daydreaming culture, and simulation belief. This file treats it as what the record supports: a real and reported internet phenomenon and a coping response to a painful election, not evidence that a timeline was altered. The verdict is debunked because the central factual claim, that the documented 2024 result is 'wrong' and a real Harris presidency exists in a parallel reality, has no support and contradicts the certified record.
Read the case file →The 2024 claim that Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio were stealing and eating residents' pets was a debunked, racist hoax, rejected by the town's own police, mayor, and governor
In September 2024, a false and racist claim swept across social media and into a U.S. presidential debate: that Haitian immigrants who had settled in Springfield, Ohio were abducting and eating their neighbors' pets, along with ducks and geese from local parks. There was no evidence for any of it. The Springfield Division of Police said it had received no credible reports; the city's Republican mayor, Rob Rue, and Ohio's Republican governor, Mike DeWine, said the claim was untrue. The rumor had begun as fourth-hand neighborhood gossip in a local Facebook group, and the woman who posted it deleted it and apologized. This file treats the hoax as exactly that. It documents where the claim came from, how it spread, why the town's own officials rejected it, and the real damage it did: dozens of bomb threats and the closure of schools, colleges, and public buildings, aimed at a Haitian community living in Springfield legally.
Read the case file →The 2024 disappearance of Catherine, Princess of Wales, concealed something sinister that the palace covered up
In January 2024 Kensington Palace announced that Catherine, Princess of Wales, had undergone planned abdominal surgery and would step back from public duties to recover. Weeks of near-total silence followed. When an official Mother's Day photograph was released on 10 March, the world's main news agencies spotted digital alterations and issued a rare “kill notice” retracting it, and Catherine said she had edited it herself. Into that vacuum poured a frenzy of speculation: that she was gravely ill, in a coma, dead, divorcing, or that a body double had replaced her. This case file keeps two things apart: a real surgery, a real absence, a badly botched photo; and the claim it rates, that the absence hid something sinister the palace was concealing. On 22 March she revealed a cancer diagnosis, later returned to public life, and in January 2025 said she was in remission. The sinister reading is debunked.
Read the case file →The 2024 Francis Scott Key Bridge collapse in Baltimore was a deliberate attack, a cyberattack, or a controlled demolition disguised as a shipping accident
At about 1:29 a.m. on 26 March 2024, the Singapore-flagged container ship Dali lost electrical power and propulsion while outbound from the Port of Baltimore and struck a support pier of the Francis Scott Key Bridge. The central truss spans collapsed into the Patapsco River within seconds. Six road-maintenance workers who were filling potholes on the deck were killed. Because the ship had issued a mayday as it drifted powerless, police were able to hold traffic off the bridge, which almost certainly saved lives. The event was filmed from several angles, and the footage went everywhere. Within hours a second story formed alongside the first: that the collision was no accident at all. This case file keeps two things apart: a power failure on a large vessel and an unprotected 1970s bridge; and the claim it rates, a deliberate attack, a cyberattack, or a controlled demolition. On the conspiracy, the evidence is clear, and the verdict is debunked.
Read the case file →The 2024 New Jersey drone sightings were a covered-up secret: mystery craft the government knows about and is hiding
Beginning around mid-November 2024, residents across New Jersey, and soon other northeastern states, reported large drones and lights in the night sky, often near the Raritan River, Picatinny Arsenal, and local reservoirs. The reports drew national media coverage and intense political attention through December. Federal agencies eventually said the sightings were a combination of lawful commercial and hobbyist drones, law-enforcement and military aircraft, helicopters, and misidentified manned planes, stars, and planets, with no evidence of a threat or a foreign operation. A popular counter-claim holds that officials secretly knew exactly what the craft were, whether a covert government program, an Iranian mothership, or a search for a lost nuclear device, and hid the truth. This file keeps the documented event separate from those readings and weighs the cover-up claim as unproven.
Read the case file →The Butler, Pennsylvania rally shooting was staged, or was a deliberate inside job in which security was intentionally stood down
On 13 July 2024, at an outdoor campaign rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, a 20-year-old gunman fired multiple rounds from a nearby rooftop. He wounded former President Donald Trump in the ear, killed rally attendee Corey Comperatore, and critically injured two other men before a Secret Service counter-sniper killed him. In the aftermath, two rival conspiracy claims spread at once: that the whole thing was staged for political effect, and that it was a deliberate inside job in which security was stood down on purpose. This case file keeps two things apart. The record, confirmed by the FBI and by bipartisan investigations in the US Senate and the House, is that the attack was real and that the security planning around it failed grievously. The separate claim it rates, that the attempt was faked or intentionally permitted, is not supported by that record. A man died, a wound was real, and the event was filmed from every angle. On the conspiracy claim, the verdict is debunked.
Read the case file →The July 2024 global IT outage was not a software defect but a deliberate cyberattack or a covert stress-test engineered as a precursor to a planned crisis
On Friday 19 July 2024, a routine content update to CrowdStrike’s Falcon security sensor pushed a defective file to Windows machines around the world. Within minutes, an estimated 8.5 million devices crashed into blue screens and boot loops. Flights were grounded, hospitals postponed procedures, banks and broadcasters went dark, and it became one of the largest IT disruptions in history. CrowdStrike identified the cause almost immediately as a faulty update, not a hack, reverted it inside about 78 minutes, and later published a full technical root-cause analysis. That is the record. The claim we rate is different: that the outage was secretly a cyberattack, a covert “stress-test” linked to the WEF’s Cyber Polygon exercises, or a deliberate precursor to a digital-ID or central-bank-digital-currency rollout. This file keeps the two apart, gives the suspicion a fair hearing (the scale genuinely was staggering, and single-vendor concentration risk is real), and then weighs it against the evidence. On the conspiracy, the verdict is debunked.
Read the case file →The Pentagon runs a secret unacknowledged program called Immaculate Constellation that hoards decades of UAP imagery outside congressional oversight
In November 2024 the independent journalist Michael Shellenberger published a 12-page whistleblower report he said described a secret Pentagon program named Immaculate Constellation. The document alleges an Unacknowledged Special Access Program, a category of secrecy so tight that officials can deny it exists, built to collect and quarantine the US government's best UAP imagery, video, radar, and signals data across the military and intelligence community, and to keep that archive outside normal congressional oversight. The report surfaced amid a genuine, documented run of congressional UAP hearings and the standing up of the Pentagon's AARO office. A man named Matthew Brown later publicly identified himself as the report's author. The Department of Defense, through spokesperson Sue Gough, has stated flatly that it holds no record of any such program. This case file separates what is documented (a report was written and published, hearings happened, the Pentagon denied it) from the claim it rates (that the program exists as described), which remains unverified and officially denied.
Read the case file →Viral online culture is now largely fake, secretly manufactured by AI influencers, synthetic personas, and coordinated engagement
The claim that online virality has quietly become fake: that AI-generated influencers, synthetic video and voice personas, bot armies, and paid engagement farms now secretly manufacture the trends, 'viral' moments, and popular accounts people see, so that little of what trends is organic. Much of the documented core is true. Openly AI-generated influencers earn real money and real followings, mass-produced 'AI slop' is measurably flooding feeds, and platforms have removed enormous numbers of fake accounts and engagement. What overreaches is the strong version, that essentially all of it is centrally coordinated and that organic human culture online is gone. This file separates the evidenced trend from the sweeping conspiracy. It is a close cousin of the older, broader Dead Internet Theory, narrowed to the specific 2025-2026 claim about manufactured virality.
Read the case file →“AI took my job” is often a corporate cover story, with companies over-crediting artificial intelligence for layoffs actually driven by pandemic-era over-hiring and ordinary cost-cutting
By 2025 and 2026, “AI is taking the jobs” had hardened into conventional wisdom, repeated in earnings calls and layoff memos across the technology sector. This file examines the counter-claim: that in many cases the story is spin. Outplacement firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas logged artificial intelligence as the stated reason for roughly 55,000 announced job cuts in 2025, a real and growing number, yet a small share of the more than a million cuts announced that year. Meanwhile a large academic survey of thousands of executives found that around nine in ten firms reported no impact from AI on employment or productivity over the previous three years, and analysts noted that many companies announcing “AI-related” layoffs did not yet have the mature AI systems that would be needed to actually replace those workers. Some executives said the quiet part aloud: Amazon's chief executive told analysts that a 14,000-person corporate cut was “not really” AI-driven. The pattern has a name, AI-washing, and this file weighs how much of the AI-layoff wave is genuine automation and how much is a more flattering label for over-hiring and cost-cutting.
Read the case file →A $2,000 tariff-dividend stimulus is being deposited to Americans in July 2026
The viral claim, and the scam attached to it, that a $2,000 'tariff dividend' stimulus payment has been approved and is being quietly deposited to Americans in mid-2026. President Trump did publicly float a tariff-dividend idea in November 2025, which gave the rumor a kernel of truth. But no such payment has passed Congress or been authorized, and none is being sent. The 'your tariff rebate is ready, click to claim' texts and links circulating in 2026 are phishing, designed to harvest personal and financial information. Consumer-protection officials and fact-checkers are unanimous: the checks are not real, and the messages are a scam.
Read the case file →A Muslim development outside Dallas is a 'Shariah city', a self-governing Islamic enclave being built inside Texas to operate outside American law
A Muslim congregation outside Dallas proposed a master-planned community: houses, a mosque, a school, shops, on 402 acres of unincorporated land. Within months it was being described as a Shariah city, an Islamic enclave built to sit outside American law. The claim is false, and the interesting thing is what happened next. The project attracted state investigations, two lawsuits from the Texas attorney general, a governor's proclamation, a federal housing investigation and a Justice Department inquiry, and the sheer weight of that activity became the argument: so much scrutiny must mean something was found. So keep two things apart. On one side, what the investigations are actually about, which is consumer protection, a utility district's board, open-meetings compliance and fair-housing marketing rules, with the Justice Department closing its inquiry after the developers agreed to follow fair housing law. On the other, the claim this file rates, that a parallel legal jurisdiction is being built in Texas. Nothing in any of it is about Sharia, and the Texas Tribune reports no indication the organisers intend anything of the kind.
Read the case file →A sustained run of fabricated quotes, doctored videos, forged statements and fake photographs has been circulated about New York mayor Zohran Mamdani since his 2025 campaign, including a false claim that he intends to impose Sharia law
Zohran Mamdani was elected mayor of New York City on 4 November 2025, the first Muslim and first South Asian to hold the office. Around that campaign and the months since, an unusually sustained run of fabricated material has circulated about him, and the notable thing is how varied the techniques are. One was a straightforward impersonation: someone posing as former mayor Bill de Blasio gave The Times of London an interview criticising Mamdani, which the paper published, then retracted and apologised for within about ninety minutes of noticing. One was a forged terrorist communique, a fake Islamic State statement circulated to associate him with the group, debunked by AFP and terrorism analysts. Others are ordinary internet fakes: a doctored photograph placing a young Mamdani beside Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell, a fabricated quote about reparations, a satire post recirculated as news, an AI video of him failing to applaud at a soldier's funeral. Running underneath them is a persistent claim that he means to impose Sharia law in New York, which PolitiFact examined and found baseless, and which is an anti-Muslim attack line rather than a description of anything in his record. This file rates whether these items are genuine. They are not. It takes no view on his politics, and it notes where a story attached to him turned out to be true.
Read the case file →A vast ancient underground city, complete with shafts and spiral staircases, lies hidden beneath the Giza pyramids and mainstream science is ignoring it
In March 2025, an Italian team associated with the University of Pisa, including Corrado Malanga and Filippo Biondi, announced that a synthetic aperture radar analysis of the Khafre pyramid had revealed an astonishing hidden world below it: eight vertical shafts wrapped in spiral staircases, pipeline-like channels, and vast structures said to plunge more than 600 metres (about 2,000 feet) underground. Headlines called it a lost city beneath Giza. The claim went viral within days. It also collided almost immediately with the people who actually work on Giza and on remote sensing, who rejected it as impossible with the stated method and unsupported by any reviewable evidence. This case file separates the record, that a group made and publicised these claims, from the claim it rates, that a giant ancient city really exists beneath the plateau and is being ignored or hidden. On that claim, the verdict is debunked.
Read the case file →Beef tallow protects your skin from the sun and is a safe, non-toxic replacement for sunscreen
A claim spread widely on TikTok in the summers of 2025 and 2026: that rendered beef fat, or tallow, shields skin from the sun and is a safer, 'non-toxic' natural alternative to chemical or mineral sunscreen. The appeal is easy to see. Tallow is a simple, single-ingredient animal fat with a long history as a skin balm, and the pitch fits neatly inside the 'Make America Healthy Again' distrust of manufactured chemicals. The problem is physics and dermatology. Plain tallow has no meaningful sun protection factor and does not absorb or reflect ultraviolet light in a way that protects skin; dermatologists say it works fine as a moisturizer but not as sunscreen, and swapping it in for sunscreen increases the risk of sunburn and, cumulatively, skin cancer. This file explains why the idea is attractive and why the dermatological consensus rejects it. It is not medical advice and prescribes no product or regimen.
Read the case file →Charlie Kirk's killing was staged, an inside job, or a cover-up, not the shooting that law enforcement described
Charlie Kirk, the 31-year-old founder of the conservative organization Turning Point USA, was shot and killed on 10 September 2025 while speaking at an outdoor event at Utah Valley University in Orem, Utah. A suspect was arrested about 33 hours later and charged with aggravated murder; that prosecution is ongoing and unproven, and the accused is presumed innocent. Alongside the official account, a wave of conspiracy theories spread almost immediately: that the killing was staged or faked, that it was an inside job, or that the real perpetrators or motive are being covered up. This case file separates the thin documented layer (a death, an arrest, a set of criminal charges, and official law-enforcement statements) from those claims, all of which remain unproven. It names no alternative culprit, because none has been established.
Read the case file →Cloud seeding caused the deadly July 2025 flash floods in the Texas Hill Country
In the pre-dawn hours of 4 July 2025, torrential rain fed by the remnants of Tropical Storm Barry and an unusually moist atmosphere triggered catastrophic flash flooding along the Guadalupe River in the Texas Hill Country. The river rose more than two stories in under an hour; more than a hundred people were killed, many of them in Kerr County, including children at a riverside summer camp. Days earlier, on 2 July, a small California firm called Rainmaker Technology had run a brief cloud-seeding operation roughly 150 miles to the south. Online accounts stitched the two together and declared the flood engineered. This case file keeps two things apart: a real, tiny seeding operation did occur; and the claim it rates, that it caused the flood. On the science and the timeline, the claim does not hold: seeding is a marginal, local, short-lived technique, and the flood's meteorology is well understood. The verdict is debunked. For the broader myth of engineered storms, see the companion file on weather control.
Read the case file →High-dose vitamin A and cod liver oil prevent and cure measles, so you don't need the MMR vaccine
Measles surged across the United States in 2025, and alongside it spread a claim that you can skip the MMR vaccine because high-dose vitamin A, or old-fashioned cod liver oil, will prevent measles and cure it if you catch it. There is a real fact buried underneath. The World Health Organization does recommend vitamin A as supportive treatment for children who already have measles, given under medical supervision at specific doses, and in vitamin-A-deficient children it measurably reduces the risk of severe complications and death. But that supportive role for a sick child is a world away from the online claim: that megadoses prevent infection, replace the vaccine, or are a safe thing to pour into a well child. They do not, and they are not. The vaccine is the only proven prevention, and in 2025 poison-control centers recorded a sharp rise in children being harmed by too much vitamin A. This file separates the legitimate, narrow medical use from the debunked grand claim. It offers no medical advice or dosing guidance.
Read the case file →Indian strikes during the May 2025 Operation Sindoor crisis hit Pakistan's Kirana Hills nuclear-storage site and triggered a radioactive leak
In May 2025, India and Pakistan fought a short, intense conflict that New Delhi called Operation Sindoor. Amid the fog of war, a claim spread online that Indian strikes had hit Kirana Hills, a suspected underground nuclear-weapons storage site near Sargodha in Pakistan's Punjab, and caused a radioactive leak. The story was dressed up with talk of a US radiation-detection aircraft and Egyptian aid flights supposedly responding to contamination, and with photos and video presented as proof. None of it held up. The IAEA said it had no indication of any radiation leak from a Pakistani nuclear facility; India's Air Marshal A K Bharti said the air force had not struck Kirana Hills; Pakistan's military denied the account; and fact-checkers matched the viral images to a Kazakh nuclear-test site and old footage from Yemen. This file reports the real conflict and the official statements as documented fact, and treats the radiation leak strictly as an unproven claim the evidence does not support.
Read the case file →Much of the viral “war footage” shared during the 2026 Iran conflict was not real: fact-checkers traced widely circulated “strike” and “missile” clips to the video game Arma 3, a 2015 warehouse explosion in China, an Algerian football celebration, and AI-generated imagery
As Iran, Israel and eventually the United States were drawn into open confrontation across 2025 and 2026, social feeds filled with dramatic clips captioned as live footage of strikes, missile barrages and downed jets. A great many were not what they claimed to be. Fact-checking teams at CNN, Poynter, NewsGuard, BBC Verify, Euronews, PolitiFact and others independently traced the most viral examples to unrelated origins: the war game Arma 3, a 2015 warehouse disaster in China, a 2021 Ukrainian depot fire, an Algerian football celebration, and a swelling stream of AI-generated imagery. Some clips had already been debunked in the Ukraine, Gaza and India-Pakistan contexts before being recycled here. This file is a case study in war disinformation: it reports the documented fakes and how they were spotted, rates those specific clips debunked, and stays strictly neutral on the conflict itself, taking no side and attributing every claim to the body that established it.
Read the case file →Online sleuths have cracked the redactions in the released Epstein files, and the recovered text and decoded black bars reveal the powerful names the government was hiding
When the Justice Department began releasing its Epstein material in December 2025, readers noticed that some of the blacked-out passages were not really blacked out. A redaction tool had placed a black image over live text rather than removing it, so the text could be selected, copied and pasted somewhere else; on some scanned pages, raising the exposure and lowering the contrast let people read through the ink. That much is real and well documented. What grew on top of it is not. Within days the activity had become a claim that the crowd had cracked the archive and exposed the names the government was hiding, and the marquee method being shared, matching the width of a censor bar to the letter count of a politician's name, has no basis at all: bar widths come from formatting, not from what is underneath. This file separates the documented technical failure from the rated claim about what it revealed. It also tracks the collateral damage, which is the part that gets least attention: people misidentified from old photo lineups, a tip-line spreadsheet recirculated as a client list, and a claim source who had already retracted her own allegations.
Read the case file →Selena Gomez has secretly been replaced by a clone or body double because her voice, appearance, and mannerisms changed
Through late 2025 and into 2026, social-media users decided that Selena Gomez's speaking voice, weight, and mannerisms had changed so much that she must have been secretly replaced by a clone or a body double, with some posts pinning the imagined swap to her 2017 kidney transplant. The idea spread on TikTok and X and slotted into a fast-moving 2026 celebrity-clone genre that had just targeted Jim Carrey. The claim is baseless. Gomez has explained the changes herself, over and over and long before the theory: she has lupus, takes medication that makes her weight fluctuate and can make her throat swell and alter her voice, and has spoken openly about a bipolar diagnosis. This case file keeps two things apart: that her health and appearance have genuinely changed and that she has described why in her own words; and the claim it rates, that she is a manufactured duplicate. On the science and the evidence, that claim is debunked, and Gomez answered it by joking about it in an April Fools' video.
Read the case file →Serbian authorities used an illegal sonic weapon against a silent vigil at the March 15, 2025 Belgrade protest
During a 15-minute silence at one of the largest protests in modern Serbian history, a sudden, jarring sound tore through the crowd on a central Belgrade boulevard and set off a stampede. Opposition politicians and rights groups say security forces fired an illegal acoustic weapon, most likely a Long-Range Acoustic Device, at peaceful demonstrators. The government flatly denies it. The core events are real and documented; the cause of the sound is not established, and the competing expert findings do not agree.
Read the case file →The 2025 Blue Origin all-female spaceflight was faked, staged, or never actually reached space
On 14 April 2025, Blue Origin's New Shepard NS-31 flight carried an all-female crew, singer Katy Perry, journalist Gayle King, Lauren Sanchez, former NASA engineer Aisha Bowe, activist and researcher Amanda Nguyen, and film producer Kerianne Flynn, on a brief suborbital trip just past the Karman line and back. Within hours, a wave of posts claimed the whole thing was faked: staged on a soundstage, rendered in CGI, or never actually in space. The supposed proof was a grab-bag of screenshots: a capsule door opened from outside, Katy Perry's hair not floating the 'right' way, an unscorched capsule, a glitchy clip of Gayle King's hand. Every one of those details has a plain explanation rooted in how a short suborbital flight actually works. The flight was real and livestreamed. What was fair to criticize was the spectacle, not the physics.
Read the case file →The 2025 Epstein files release was managed to conceal a secret client list and shield powerful people, and the promised names are still being hidden
In 2025 the long-running suspicion that the government was sitting on Epstein secrets collided with the government itself. After officials, the Attorney General among them, publicly raised expectations of a client list and damning files, a joint Department of Justice and FBI memo in July 2025 concluded there was no incriminating client list, no evidence that Epstein blackmailed prominent figures, and no basis to charge uncharged third parties, and it reaffirmed that he died by suicide. The reversal set off a bipartisan firestorm alleging a cover-up. Congress responded by passing the Epstein Files Transparency Act almost unanimously; it was signed into law, and more than three million pages were subsequently released. This case file weighs the specific claim that a hidden client or blackmail list exists and is being concealed, keeping the documented process apart from the claim it rates, and it deals with the records fight rather than accusing any individual.
Read the case file →The 2025 GENIUS Act is a secret central bank digital currency in disguise, a scheme to abolish cash and let the government surveil, freeze, and confiscate everyone's money
In July 2025 President Trump signed the GENIUS Act, the first federal framework for dollar-backed payment stablecoins. Within a year a claim had spread that the law is really a central bank digital currency in disguise: the surveillance-and-freeze digital dollar that Congress had publicly disavowed, smuggled in under a friendlier name. The framing gets the basic architecture backwards. A CBDC is money issued directly by the central bank; the GENIUS Act instead licenses private companies and banks to issue tokens backed by reserves, and the same Congress separately moved to forbid the Federal Reserve from issuing a retail CBDC at all. There are real, documented worries about stablecoins, on privacy, traceability, address-freezing, and consumer safeguards, and this file keeps them in view. What the record does not support is the specific claim that the law is a covert government currency for total control.
Read the case file →The 2025 Iberian Peninsula blackout was a deliberate cyberattack or engineered sabotage, not a technical grid failure
At 12:33 CET on 28 April 2025, the electricity systems of mainland Spain and Portugal collapsed almost simultaneously. About 31 GW of demand dropped off the grid within seconds; trains stopped, traffic lights died, phone networks failed, and most of the peninsula went dark for roughly ten hours. Into that alarming silence rushed a cyberattack story. Two pro-Russian hacktivist groups claimed credit, and viral posts pinned the blame on Russia, Morocco or North Korea, some citing a CNN report and a Ursula von der Leyen quote that were never real. This case file keeps two things apart: a continent-scale blackout with a technical cause; and the claim it rates, that it was a deliberate attack. On the attack claim, the official findings are consistent and the verdict is debunked. What survives is a legitimate, and quite different, debate about grid resilience, voltage control and how modern power systems ride through disturbances.
Read the case file →The 2025 Las Vegas Cybertruck explosion outside the Trump hotel was a staged inside job or a coordinated plot whose true cause is being covered up
On the morning of January 1, 2025, a Tesla Cybertruck loaded with firework mortars and fuel canisters caught fire and exploded in the valet portico of the Trump International Hotel Las Vegas. The sole occupant, active-duty U.S. Army Green Beret Matthew Livelsberger, had shot himself in the head moments before the blast; seven bystanders suffered minor injuries. Because a second veteran had driven a truck into a crowd in New Orleans hours earlier, and because the target was a Tesla parked at a Trump property, a conspiracy took shape almost at once: that this was staged, an inside job, or a coordinated plot being covered up. This case file keeps two things apart: a lone, premeditated act ending in suicide; and the conspiracy claim it rates, following what investigators actually found. On the conspiracy, the verdict is debunked.
Read the case file →The 2025 New Orleans Bourbon Street truck attack was a coordinated plot or inside job whose real perpetrators are being concealed
In the early hours of 1 January 2025, a man drove a rented pickup truck into a crowd celebrating the new year on Bourbon Street in New Orleans, killing fourteen people and injuring dozens before he was shot and killed in a gunfight with police. An ISIS flag was in the vehicle. The FBI investigated and concluded he was inspired by the Islamic State and had acted alone. That is the record. Around it, a fog of conspiracy claims formed almost immediately: that a team of attackers was involved, that the whole event was staged, that evidence was being hidden, that it was tied to the Las Vegas Cybertruck explosion the same morning, and, most corrosively, false narratives blaming immigrants or Israel. This case file keeps the record apart from those rated claims, explains the legitimate reasons early reporting was confused, and shows why the conspiracy layer does not hold. On those claims, the verdict is debunked.
Read the case file →The 2025-2026 Bitcoin collapse was engineered: a Wall Street trading firm has been dumping Bitcoin ETF shares at the US market open to crush the price, and the record $19 billion liquidation cascade of 10 October was caused by an exchange failure that is being covered up
Something genuinely bad happened to crypto markets and nobody disputes the scale of it. On 10 October 2025 a chain of forced liquidations wiped out around 19 billion dollars of leveraged positions, the largest single-day liquidation by dollar value the market has seen, and Bitcoin fell as much as 12.5 percent. Liquidity never fully came back: spreads stayed wide, order books stayed thin, and the price slid from about 125,000 dollars to under 65,000 by early March 2026. When a market falls that far that fast, the search for a culprit is immediate, and two candidates emerged. The first was Binance, blamed by many traders for an internal failure on the day, which the exchange rejected. The second, and the one that went viral in late February 2026, was the trading firm Jane Street, accused on social media of systematically dumping Bitcoin ETF holdings at the US open to depress the price and profit from the wreckage. This file keeps the crash and the explanation apart. The crash is documented. The engineered-crash claim is not established, its central mechanism has never been shown, and the scale of the accused firm's disclosed holdings sits awkwardly with the effect attributed to it. We report the allegations as allegations and assert no wrongdoing by anyone.
Read the case file →The atrocity imagery from el-Fasher is AI-generated, so the reported massacre either did not happen or has been wildly exaggerated
Almost no journalists were inside el-Fasher when it fell. Communications were cut, aid was blocked, and the demand for pictures of what was happening vastly exceeded the supply, which is the condition under which fabricated imagery reliably floods in. It did. A photograph of a mother and child said to be moments from execution was traced by VRT to a digital video producer whose own Instagram caption, in Arabic, says the image was made with AI. A video of an elderly woman sobbing was traced by VerificaRTVE to a TikTok account that produces this material routinely, and whose owner has posted a video of himself prompting ChatGPT to make it. A widely shared clip of a mother and three children was real but was not what the caption said: DW found it had been posted in mid-September, more than a month before the city fell, and its Arabic desk concluded the soldiers were army rather than RSF, and were asking the woman where she was from rather than threatening her. So the sceptics have a point, and then they take it somewhere it does not go. What the massacre finding actually rests on is not viral footage at all. It is commercial satellite imagery, analysed over an eighteen-month siege in more than sixty-five reports, and a UN mission that read that analysis and concluded genocide.
Read the case file →The camera does not lie: a viral clip of an argument, a theft or a confession is footage of something that happened
A creator films a sketch, writes Comedy on it, and posts it. Someone downloads that file, throws away the caption, and reposts it as a real fight, a real theft, a real confession. The video is unchanged; the lie is everything around it. Six checks over twelve months show how routine this has become. Factly traced a mid-flight altercation to Fly High Institute Nagpur, an air-hostess training school that had posted it in three parts as cabin-crew training material. It traced a woman's confession that she had married her father-in-law to a sketch channel whose videos carry entertainment disclaimers. It traced a chain-snatching to a creator whose caption read, in full, that the video is totally scripted and made for entertainment and awareness. It traced two communal videos, one of a man mocking an elderly Muslim man and one of a woman destroying a saffron-coloured motorcycle, to a comedy duo and to a prank account. Lead Stories traced a shelter video about an 83-year-old surrendering her dog to an account whose original upload said it was made with AI for entertainment and storytelling. In every case the label existed. In every case it was outside the video file, and so it did not travel.
Read the case file →The crash of Air India Flight 171 was deliberate, or its true cause is being covered up
On 12 June 2025, Air India Flight 171, a Boeing 787-8 Dreamliner bound from Ahmedabad to London Gatwick, crashed about half a minute after takeoff into a medical college hostel, killing 260 people: 241 of the 242 aboard and 19 on the ground. One passenger survived. India's Aircraft Accident Investigation Bureau (AAIB) released a preliminary report in July 2025 documenting that both engine fuel-control switches moved to the CUTOFF position seconds after liftoff, and recording a brief cockpit exchange in which one pilot asked why the fuel had been cut off and the other said he had not done so. The report did not establish why the switches moved and reached no conclusion on cause. Into that gap, and hardened when the AAIB told India's Supreme Court in July 2026 that the draft final report would not be ready until around October 2026 and that the full CVR transcript would stay confidential, poured theories that the crash was deliberate or that its true cause is being hidden. This file separates what the investigation has documented from what it has not, and treats every claim that a named, deceased pilot deliberately crashed the aircraft strictly as an unproven allegation, never as fact.
Read the case file →The February 2026 'planet parade' would trigger earthquakes, tsunamis, or a pole shift
As six planets lined up to appear together in the evening sky around February 28, 2026, viral posts and low-quality news aggregators recycled a familiar scare: that the 'planet parade' would concentrate enough gravity to set off earthquakes, tsunamis, or even flip Earth's poles. Astronomers had answered the claim in advance. A planet parade is a line-of-sight effect, several planets happening to sit along the same arc of sky as seen from Earth, not a straight line in space, and the planets' combined tidal pull on our planet is a rounding error next to the Moon's. The date came and went as a pleasant stargazing event and nothing more.
Read the case file →The interstellar object 3I/ATLAS is alien technology being hidden by space agencies
In July 2025 astronomers confirmed the third known visitor from beyond our Solar System, an object on an unbound path that will never return. Most of the field sees an ordinary, if ancient, comet. A smaller current of speculation, amplified online and given intellectual cover by one prominent Harvard astrophysicist, asks whether it might instead be a piece of alien technology, and whether the agencies tracking it are downplaying what they know.
Read the case file →The January 2025 Los Angeles wildfires were deliberately engineered, ignited by a directed-energy weapon to clear land for a 'smart city' and force residents out
Between 7 and 31 January 2025, a swarm of wind-driven wildfires tore across Los Angeles County. The two worst, the Palisades fire on the west side and the Eaton fire above Altadena, killed roughly 30 people and destroyed or damaged more than 18,000 structures, among the most destructive fires in California history. Within days a familiar claim spread: that the fires were no accident, that a directed-energy weapon (DEW) had ignited them from the sky, and that the goal was to clear the land for a corporate 'smart city' or to force residents out through insurance and displacement. This case file separates two things. The disaster and its failures, empty reservoirs, hydrants that lost pressure, policies dropped before the flames, are real and infuriating. The engineered-fire story is not supported by any evidence, misreads the physics, and leans on photographs that show ordinary things. Meteorologists, fire scientists, and fact-checkers trace the catastrophe to extreme winds, drought, and dry fuel, while the ignitions are being investigated through conventional means. We rate the directed-energy claim debunked, and treat the looser 'land grab' claim as unsupported speculation.
Read the case file →The Rapture would occur on 23–24 September 2025, as foretold in a South African pastor's vision and spread by the viral #RaptureTok movement
In June 2025, a South African pastor named Joshua Mhlakela said in an interview that he had seen a vision of Jesus on his throne declaring he would return on 23 and 24 September 2025. The clip spread far beyond its origin, and by September the prediction had become a genuine internet phenomenon under the hashtag #RaptureTok, generating an estimated 300,000 TikTok posts. Some people reported selling possessions, quitting jobs, or writing goodbye notes; far more mocked the date or made memes of it. The dates passed with no Rapture, and Mhlakela then suggested the event might instead fall in early October on the Julian calendar. This case file keeps two things apart: a viral prediction tied to a specific date; and the claim it rates, that the Rapture would actually occur then. It takes the sincerity of Rapture belief seriously, and finds the dated forecast debunked by the simplest possible test: the date arrived and nothing happened.
Read the case file →The US Army has quietly commissioned senior technology executives as lieutenant colonels, handing Silicon Valley rank inside the military
Detachment 201 is real, publicly announced, and named after an HTTP status code. On 13 June 2025 the Army directly commissioned four technology executives as Army Reserve lieutenant colonels, a rank that ordinarily takes close to two decades to reach, to advise on what the Army calls fusing cutting-edge tech expertise with military innovation. Andrew Bosworth of Meta explained the number publicly: HTTP 201 is the response a server returns when a new resource has been created. In 2026 the story went round again with the strong implication that it had just happened, and Snopes rated the claim True on 10 August while pointing out that the swearing-in was the previous year. Underneath that recirculation sat the actual news. In June 2026 the Army commissioned a second cohort, Dane Knecht of Cloudflare, Sam Pullara of Sutter Hill Ventures and Serkan Piantino, with Army Secretary Daniel Driscoll administering the oath, after overhauling the direct commissioning pipeline and cutting roughly a year from it. Almost nobody sharing the 2025 story mentioned any of that.
Read the case file →The video going round proves what happened: authentic footage circulating during a breaking news event documents the event it is captioned with
The advice of the last three years has been to watch for the tells of synthetic media: hands with too many fingers, dissolving text, impossible physics. That advice works, and it has trained a large audience to check the wrong thing. The most effective misinformation during a breaking news event is not generated at all. It is authentic footage, filmed somewhere else or some years ago, with a new caption attached. Nothing about the pixels is wrong, so every instinct a careful viewer has developed returns nothing, and the absence of a tell reads as a pass. During one week of the Ceuta border crisis in July 2026, fact-checkers traced clips captioned as the crossing to riots in Nador in Morocco, to Libya in 2023, to a commemoration of the prophet Noah on a Turkish mountain, and to the earlier 2021 Ceuta crisis. In the United States, footage of an apartment complex water fight circulated for months labelled as a security guard before being recaptioned as an ICE officer confronting children. This file rates the inference that footage passing an authenticity check documents the event it is captioned with, and on the record collected here that inference is debunked.
Read the case file →The viral “CCTV” clips said to show the thieves inside the Louvre during the October 2025 crown-jewels heist are not real security footage: fact-checkers traced them to OpenAI’s Sora 2 video generator
Hours after masked thieves stole crown jewels from the Louvre’s Apollo Gallery on 19 October 2025, feeds filled with grainy, timestamped clips presented as CCTV or phone video of the raid in progress. They looked like the leaked footage everyone wanted, and they were fakes. Fact-checking teams at France 24, AFP, the South China Morning Post and CEDMO independently traced the clips to OpenAI’s Sora 2 generator, spotting a Sora watermark left visible in an early upload, a second watermark pasted over it to hide the tell, a filming hand reflected in empty space, and a display-case layout that does not match the real gallery. No authentic interior footage of the heist was ever released, and the vacuum was filled with synthetic video. This file keeps the two layers apart: the robbery is a documented crime, and the viral “proof” of it is AI-generated. It rates only the clips, and rates them debunked.
Read the case file →The viral “cursed calendar” claim that 2025 is doomed to repeat the catastrophes of 1941 because the two years share an identical calendar grid is a debunked numerological coincidence with no predictive power
In mid-2025 a claim ricocheted around Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube: that 2025 is a “cursed” year because its calendar is identical to 1941's, and that history is therefore looping back to repeat the horrors of the Second World War. A single reel by the Indian creator Kuldeep Singhania, splicing 2025 tragedies together with 1941 ones, drew more than 22 million views and spawned countless imitations. The eye-catching hook is real: 2025 and 1941 do share the same calendar, because both are non-leap years beginning on a Wednesday. But that is a routine property of the Gregorian calendar, which recycles its handful of possible year-grids on a predictable schedule. The same grid belongs to a long list of unremarkable years, and matching weekdays cannot predict events. This file explains why the calendars line up, why 1941 was singled out from a crowd of equally valid matches, and why the “curse” is a coincidence dressed up as prophecy.
Read the case file →The wave of drones over European airports and military bases is a manufactured pretext, staged or inflated by NATO governments to justify rearmament and escalation with Russia
Since September 2025, drones have closed airports across Europe: Copenhagen, Oslo, Munich twice in a day, Brussels, Berlin, Bremen, Liege, Gothenburg. They have appeared over Belgian air bases, a French naval base that hosts the country's ballistic-missile submarines, and Danish military sites. Poland and Estonia both invoked NATO's Article 4. Almost none of it has been solved. A counter-claim travels alongside the incidents and sometimes ahead of them: that this is a manufactured emergency, staged or inflated by European governments to sell rearmament to their voters. That claim is contradicted by the physical evidence, most recently an armed drone recovered at a German cargo hub in August 2026. But the file that stops there is only doing half the job, because the reason the counter-claim finds an audience is a genuine hole in the official account. For fifteen months, across dozens of incidents in seven countries, essentially no operator has been identified and no drone recovered. What this file rates is the pretext claim. What it also documents is how little anyone has proved about who is responsible.
Read the case file →The works beneath the new White House ballroom are too large to be a ballroom: the real project is a hardened military complex, and building on that scale means the government is preparing for a war or a catastrophe it has not disclosed
In July 2025 the White House announced a 90,000-square-foot ballroom. The East Wing came down that October, the price estimate climbed, the renderings kept changing, and online the explanations began: an underground data centre, a private shelter, something. Then a preservation group sued, and the litigation did what the renderings had not. On 29 March 2026 the president told reporters the military was building a big complex under the ballroom, saying it had come out because of the lawsuit. Two days later Judge Richard Leon ordered above-ground construction halted until Congress authorised it, while expressly allowing underground construction of bomb shelters and bunkers to proceed. The president had said the ballroom, that the ballroom essentially becomes a shed for what is being built under it, and read from a handwritten note listing a droneproof roof, secure air handling, bio-defence, secure communications, bomb shelters and major medical facilities. So the underground complex is not a rumour; it is conceded, on the record, by the people building it. The open question is what follows from that. One reading is that a project on this scale implies a threat the public has not been told about. Another is arithmetic: reporting on the same case describes a nuclear-hardened bunker finished under the White House more than a decade ago, and the World War II Presidential Emergency Operations Center has been an open secret since 9/11. On 31 August 2026 the Supreme Court allowed construction to continue by 5-4, with Chief Justice Roberts dissenting, and the underlying case is still live.
Read the case file →Unelected aides secretly ran the country during Biden's term and used an autopen to sign his pardons and orders, making those acts legally void
President Biden, like several presidents before him, used an autopen to place his signature on some documents, including a batch of pardons and commutations issued in the final days of his term. Out of that ordinary fact grew a sweeping claim: that unelected aides secretly ran the country, signed Biden's pardons and executive orders by machine without his authorization, and that those acts are therefore legally void, so a later president can simply terminate them. This case file keeps two things apart: autopen use is real and a House committee issued a report making serious allegations; and the legal claim it rates, that the resulting pardons and orders are void. On the law, the claim does not hold: the Constitution nowhere requires a president to sign a pardon by hand, a 1929 Solicitor General memo and a 2005 Justice Department Office of Legal Counsel opinion both endorse machine signing, presidents from Lincoln to Obama delegated or mechanized signatures, and courts have long held that once a pardon is delivered it is final and irrevocable. The verdict on the void-pardon claim is debunked. The distinct questions the report raises about capacity, delegation, and disclosure are treated here as open, not as proof of the theory.
Read the case file →Videos circulating since late 2025 that appear to show Ukrainian soldiers weeping, apologizing to the Russian people, and surrendering en masse are authentic front-line footage
In early November 2025, videos began circulating that appeared to show Ukrainian soldiers at their lowest: weeping, calling for their mothers, apologizing to the Russian people, blaming their own government for the war, and in some clips surrendering to Russian forces in groups. The footage was ultrarealistic and it traveled fast across YouTube, TikTok, Facebook and X. It was also generated. NBC News reviewed 21 of the videos and reported on 13 December 2025 that in at least half the giveaway was not subtle at all: Sora 2 stamps a small logo on downloaded video, and it was still there. Clips that appeared to come from other generators carried quieter errors instead, principally uniforms and helmets that were incorrect or simplified versions of real Ukrainian kit. A third signal was plain to Ukrainian viewers and meaningless to everyone else: most of the soldiers spoke Russian, and only eight of the 21 clips featured anyone speaking Ukrainian. One recurring face belonged to Aleksei Gubanov, a livestreamer who had fled Russia over his opposition to Putin and recognized himself in a uniform he had never worn. This file separates the real war, in which soldiers genuinely are captured and killed, from the rated claim that these particular videos document it. That claim is debunked. Who made and seeded them has not been established.
Read the case file →Viral videos show Iran striking and sinking a US aircraft carrier, the USS Gerald R. Ford or USS Abraham Lincoln, with ballistic or hypersonic missiles
Through 2026, short videos spread across social media claiming to show Iran striking a US aircraft carrier with ballistic or hypersonic missiles, setting it ablaze or sinking it. Different versions named different ships, usually the USS Gerald R. Ford or the USS Abraham Lincoln, and the clips resurfaced in waves, including a fresh burst around 24 July 2026. Fact-checkers including Lead Stories, PolitiFact, Misbar, and Tempo examined them and found the same thing every time: the footage is fabricated, either generated by AI tools or ripped from military video games and simulators such as Arma 3 and DCS. Several clips carry a Google Veo watermark or the stamp of a page that describes itself as a digital content creator; AI-detection tools rated some as very likely synthetic at high confidence; and telltale flaws (fire without smoke, flames that animate unnaturally, hulls that do not match the real ships) give them away. No credible outlet reported such a strike, and US military officials said Iran's missiles did not come close to a carrier. This case file keeps two things apart: that these videos circulated and were repeatedly debunked, against a backdrop of real US-Iran tensions in 2026; and the claim it rates, that any of the clips is genuine footage of a carrier being hit. That claim is debunked.
Read the case file →Viral videos showing dramatic ICE raids at Walmart, McDonald's, and other workplaces are authentic footage of real immigration enforcement
Through late 2025 and into 2026, hundreds of AI-generated videos depicting supposed ICE immigration raids, at Walmarts, McDonald's, workplaces, schools, and on city streets, racked up millions of views across Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube. Engagement accounts such as 'USA Journey 897' mass-produced them with text-to-video tools, principally OpenAI's Sora. Fact-checkers including Full Fact, HuffPost, Euronews, and Snopes confirmed the specific viral clips are synthetic fabrications, not footage of real events, identifying them through leftover Sora watermarks, uniform clip lengths, and visual errors. This case file debunks the authenticity of those clips only. It takes no position on actual immigration enforcement, which is documented separately by conventional journalism. The deeper story is the 'liar's dividend': a flood of convincing fakes does double damage, spreading false events while also giving anyone cover to dismiss genuine footage as 'just AI.'
Read the case file →Within hours of a mass-casualty attack, posts reveal the suspect's voter registration and political affiliation, proving the other side did it
It has become one of the most predictable sequences in American news. An attack happens, a suspect is named, and within hours posts circulate announcing that person's party registration, always the party the poster opposes. The format is durable because it feels checkable: voter registration is a public record, so a claim about it sounds like something someone looked up. Very often nobody looked anything up, and in around twenty states there is nothing to look up, because those states do not record party affiliation when you register to vote. After a Democratic Minnesota lawmaker and her husband were shot in June 2025, two US senators described the suspect as a Marxist or of the extreme left within hours; official records listed his affiliation as none or other, and friends told reporters he was a Trump supporter. After a man was charged over one of the Spokane wildfires in August 2026, a viral post called him a registered Republican; Washington does not register voters by party, and the Secretary of State's office said it had no voter under that name at all. This file rates the format, not any individual case, and takes no position on anyone's guilt.
Read the case file →A 2026 viral story claiming President Bola Tinubu was secretly preparing a constitutional package code-named "Project True Federation" to rename Nigeria the "United States of Nigeria" and abolish Sharia law in the north was a fabrication, publicly denied by the Nigerian Presidency and unsupported by any record in the National Assembly
In May 2026, a story spread across Nigerian social media and messaging apps claiming that President Bola Tinubu was secretly readying a sweeping constitutional package, said to be code-named "Project True Federation." According to the viral version, it would rename the country the "United States of Nigeria," abolish Sharia law in the northern region, and devolve major powers from the federal government to the states. The Presidency rejected the account in full. A statement dated 21 May 2026, signed by presidential spokesman Bayo Onanuga, said there was "no truth" to the claim and that Tinubu had no plan whatsoever to send any bill by that name to the National Assembly, describing the report as the work of "desperate politicians" seeking to stir division before the 2027 general elections. Fact-checkers agreed: Africa Check and Fact Check Africa found no bill, motion, or committee record connected to "Project True Federation," and noted that a constitutional change of that scale would in any case require two-thirds majorities in both chambers of the National Assembly plus the concurrence of at least 24 state Houses of Assembly. This case file treats the report as what the record shows it to be, a fabricated rumour, and examines why a claim touching Nigeria's most sensitive fault lines travelled so fast. It does not assert any part of the claim as true.
Read the case file →A coordinated 9-day global blackout of power, internet, and communications will begin on 18 July 2026, staged as part of Agenda 2030 and a planned great reset
In the summer of 2026 a claim spread across social media that a coordinated 9-day global blackout would begin on 18 July 2026, shutting down electricity, the internet, and communications worldwide. Many versions tied the supposed shutdown to Agenda 2030 or a planned great reset and said governments were hiding the plan from the public. Fact-checkers including Tempo, Factually, and Boatos examined the claim and found nothing behind it: no official statement, no scientific study, no technical basis, and no single global grid that could be shut off at once. Indonesia's energy ministry explicitly denied any such plan. This case file keeps two things apart: that the hoax went viral and was checked and rejected, which is a matter of record; and the claim it actually rates, that the blackout was real or planned. That claim is debunked. It follows a well-worn template of dated blackout and darkness hoaxes, several of them falsely attributed to NASA, that recur every year or two and always pass without event.
Read the case file →A Department of Energy-branded card announcing a nationwide "energy lockdown" in the Philippines starting April 20, 2026 was a fabrication, publicly debunked by Malacanang and the DOE
In early April 2026, a slickly designed card bearing the Department of Energy's logo told Filipinos that a nationwide "energy lockdown" would begin on April 20, and instructed them to prepare power banks, solar equipment, rechargeable fans, flashlights, candles, food, medicine, and water. None of it was real. The DOE issued no such advisory, and there was no lockdown. Malacanang debunked the card as fake news on April 3, the DOE posted its own denial on April 6, and fact-checking outlets confirmed the graphic was fabricated. The hoax arrived at a vulnerable moment: President Marcos had declared a state of national energy emergency on March 24 as the war between the United States, Israel, and Iran drove up oil prices, so a message about power and fuel found an anxious, primed audience. This case file treats the card as what it was, a manufactured panic trigger with a commercial and disinformation edge, and does not lend any weight to the lockdown it invented.
Read the case file →A July 2026 wave of AI deepfake videos falsely showed Union Minister Piyush Goyal and Prime Minister Narendra Modi threatening student protesters as though those were their real words; the most viral clip took genuine PTI footage of Goyal and swapped in a fabricated audio track, and the government's PIB Fact Check unit dismissed the videos as AI-generated, with an FIR registered on 25 July
In late July 2026, as students protested at Jantar Mantar over an alleged NEET-UG paper leak, a batch of short videos spread that appeared to show senior Indian leaders threatening the demonstrators. In the most viral, Union Minister Piyush Goyal seemed to call, on camera at a real media interaction, for protesters to be violently punished; another clip put similar words in Prime Minister Narendra Modi's mouth. None of it was authentic. The Goyal video was built from genuine footage recorded by PTI outside Parliament on 23 July, with the original audio stripped out and an AI-generated track dropped in, so the visuals looked like a real news clip while the words were invented. The government's PIB Fact Check unit dismissed the Modi and Goyal videos as AI-generated deepfakes. Goyal said his remarks had been maliciously doctored, an FIR was registered on 25 July, and platform links were taken down. This case file treats the videos as what fact-checkers found them to be, manufactured clips, and examines how an audio swap on real footage can weaponise a public figure's own image within hours. It does not repeat the fabricated remarks as anyone's actual words.
Read the case file →A string of dead and missing scientists in the 2020s reveals a coordinated campaign to silence people who knew classified secrets
In February 2026, retired U.S. Air Force Major General William Neil McCasland, a 68-year-old former commander of the Air Force Research Laboratory, walked out of his Albuquerque home and did not return. His disappearance, still unresolved, became the seed of a viral theory: that a run of deaths and disappearances among people described online as scientists tied to classified research (UFOs and UAP, advanced energy, materials science) reflects a campaign to silence those who know too much. This case file keeps two things apart: real cases, a real open investigation, real secrecy around defense research; and the claim it rates, that the cases are linked and that people were killed or made to vanish to bury secret knowledge. Experts and fact-checkers who examined the list found cases scattered across years and explained by unrelated circumstances, with no evidence of a coordinated hand. On the pattern claim, the verdict is debunked.
Read the case file →A Time magazine cover featuring Brazilian President Lula circulated in May 2026 as a current, new cover, proof of his international standing, when it was a recycled 2022 image and no May 2026 Time edition featured him
In May 2026, an image of Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva on the cover of Time magazine circulated widely on Brazilian social media, framed as a current cover and as proof of his standing on the world stage. The image was genuine but old: it is Time's cover from May 2022, when Lula was preparing his campaign against Jair Bolsonaro. According to Time's own website, none of the editions it published dated 11 May 2026 featured Lula at all; they featured Hailey Bieber, Sundar Pichai, the YouTuber MrBeast, and a US-Cuba illustration across the different regional editions. The claim recirculated amid renewed friction between Brazil and the United States and was even shared by a PT federal deputy before Brazilian fact-checkers Agencia Lupa and Aos Fatos, and the Portuguese outlet Observador, traced it to the 2022 edition and debunked it. This case file treats the claim as what the record shows: a real 2022 cover falsely presented as a new one. It does not take any position on Lula or his government.
Read the case file →A US military GPS jamming exercise brought down a medical evacuation flight in New Mexico in May 2026, killing all four people aboard, and the military is responsible for their deaths
Shortly after midnight on 14 May 2026, a Beechcraft King Air C90 air ambulance left Roswell, New Mexico, to collect a patient. Twenty-three minutes later it flew into the side of the Capitan Mountains near Ruidoso. Both pilots and both flight nurses were killed. What emerged in the NTSB's preliminary findings, and reached a wide audience when Stars and Stripes reported it on 5 August, is a sequence that reads badly for the United States military. The crew told air traffic control they had lost GPS. A supervisor called the military, which was conducting a jamming exercise at White Sands Missile Range, and asked it to stop. As the aircraft neared Ruidoso the supervisor called back and said jamming could resume. Five minutes after that, the aircraft hit the mountain. Three other aircraft reported GPS problems to controllers the same night. This file rates the claim that the jamming caused the crash and that the military is therefore responsible for four deaths. That claim is unproven, and the NTSB has said in terms that it has not determined a probable cause or any contributing factor. The documented sequence and the causal conclusion are two different things, and most of the coverage has collapsed them.
Read the case file →A video circulating since 5 August 2026 shows the moment a SpaceX rocket stage slammed into the Moon, throwing up a plume and leaving a hundred-foot crater
On 5 August 2026 a spent SpaceX upper stage hit the Moon. Astronomers had seen it coming, and the European Southern Observatory confirmed the impact the way such things are usually confirmed: spectroscopically, by detecting sodium and lithium in a plume that lasted a few minutes. Nobody produced footage, because confirming an impact and filming one are different problems. Within fifteen minutes of the predicted moment, a video appeared on TikTok showing an object striking the lunar surface and throwing up a white cloud, and it went on to millions of views on X, with one caption claiming a hundred-foot crater. The clip is not from 5 August. Snopes reverse-searched it to a wider version posted in April, four months earlier, by a Facebook page that produces AI-generated videos of mysterious objects hitting the Moon. Full Fact asked astronomers, who said it does not match the Moon's real terrain or the true impact site. This file keeps the two things apart: a real, predicted collision confirmed without pictures, and a synthetic video that arrived to fill the gap where the pictures would have been.
Read the case file →A viral 2026 video appearing to show India's Army Chief accusing former military leadership of hiding the bodies of soldiers killed in Operation Sindoor was an AI-generated deepfake, debunked by the government's PIB Fact Check unit and multiple detection tools
In mid-2026, a short video began circulating that appeared to show General Dhiraj Seth, India's Chief of the Army Staff, delivering an explosive accusation: that the country's previous military leadership had hidden the bodies of soldiers killed in Operation Sindoor to protect its image, and that even the defence minister and prime minister had been kept in the dark. None of it was real. The government's PIB Fact Check unit identified the clip as an AI-generated deepfake, made by attaching synthetic audio to authentic footage of the general speaking on an unrelated occasion. Deepfake-detection services reached the same conclusion, with Resemble AI flagging the video as about 96% synthetic. This case file treats the video as what it is, a manufactured piece of war-time disinformation, and examines how a synthetic clip of a trusted uniformed official is engineered to weaponise real national grief. It does not lend any credence to the accusation the fake was built to spread.
Read the case file →A viral video showing President Trump collapsing as he got into a vehicle is real and proves his declining health is being hidden
In late July 2026 a short video spread across X and TikTok that appeared to show President Donald Trump, then 80, collapsing as he tried to get into a vehicle. Many who shared it presented it as proof that his declining health was being concealed from the public. The footage is not real: it was generated with AI software, and the account that first posted it wrote in a caption that the video was AI even as others reshared it as authentic. The fake was built from genuine footage published on 1 July 2026 that shows Trump pausing briefly, one foot in the doorway, before completing an unremarkable step into the car; at no point in the real clip does he fall. Fact-checkers including Snopes and Lead Stories examined the viral version, flagged tell-tale signs of AI synthesis such as blurred edges and misshapen hands, and found no credible news report of any such collapse. This case file keeps two things apart: the president's age and the ordinary real footage the fake was derived from; and the claim it rates, that the collapse video is genuine. That claim is debunked. It is a textbook synthetic-media hoax: a real, mundane moment re-rendered by AI into a dramatic one, then circulated as evidence.
Read the case file →AI companies are quietly buying up millions of physical books, including rare and obscure titles, slicing them apart to scan them for training data and destroying them, under a secret programme deliberately kept from the public
In July 2026 a claim spread across Instagram, Facebook and Reddit that AI companies were buying obscure and rare physical books in bulk, cutting them apart to scan them, and destroying them to build chatbots, under an internal programme whose own documentation said the work should be kept quiet. Unusually for something that travels that well, it is largely true, and the evidence is not a leak but a court file. During a copyright lawsuit brought by authors in 2024, a judge ordered Anthropic to unseal internal records. Those records, public since January 2026, describe Project Panama, defined in an April 2024 memo as the effort to destructively scan all the books in the world, with a stated reason for the codename: the company did not want the work known. Scanning at that speed requires slicing the spine off a book, and the pages are not put back. By October 2024 internal documents indicate millions of books had been bought. Two things in the viral telling go beyond the record: no confirmation exists that other AI companies did the same, and whether the targeted books were rare in any collector's sense is unclear. And one thing tends to get dropped: a federal judge ruled the practice fair use. This file separates what the documents show from what the posts added.
Read the case file →Angelina Jolie has secretly been replaced by a clone or body double because she looked different at recent public appearances
In late March 2026, close-up clips of Angelina Jolie at a Tom Ford event in Shanghai went viral, and some viewers decided the 50-year-old actress looked so different that she must have been secretly replaced by a clone or a body double. The idea spread fast on TikTok and X, was recycled through the spring and summer around further public appearances, and slotted neatly into an existing online genre that had recently targeted stars like Jim Carrey. The claim is baseless. What the footage shows is the ordinary product of aging, weight and health changes, makeup, styling, and the way a face reads under specific lighting, lenses, and angles, compounded by cropped, filtered, and sometimes doctored images passed around as proof. This case file keeps two things apart: that a real online rumor circulated and that Jolie's look has changed as she has aged; and the claim it rates, that she is literally a manufactured duplicate. On the science and the evidence, that claim is debunked.
Read the case file →Anthony Fauci's July 2026 Senate testimony proved the truth about masks, social distancing and vaccines, and his silence under the Fifth Amendment is itself the confession
On 29 July 2026 Anthony Fauci was subpoenaed before a Senate committee chaired by Rand Paul and said almost nothing. He read a statement invoking the Fifth Amendment, noted that it pained him to do so, and then declined to answer questions. Within days a claim was circulating that the appearance had proved a long list of things: that masks did not work, that the six-foot distancing rule was invented, that the vaccines were misrepresented, that hydroxychloroquine and ivermectin would have saved lives, and in Brazil that it vindicated Bolsonaro's handling of the pandemic. None of it can follow from the hearing, because no answers were given. The claim describes testimony that does not exist. Its second move is more interesting than its first: it treats the invocation of a constitutional right as a confession, which is the exact opposite of what that right is for. This file separates the record from the claim. The hearing, the subpoena, the released diary pages and the pending contempt process are documented. The idea that any of it settled a scientific or policy question is not, and we accuse nobody of anything.
Read the case file →Artificial intelligence, from chatbots like Grok to AI deepfakes, is being used as part of a coordinated covert scheme to secretly control or rig the 2026 US midterm elections
Going into the 2026 US midterm elections, a claim has spread that artificial intelligence is the hidden instrument of a plot to rig the vote: that AI chatbots such as Grok, together with AI-generated deepfake audio and video of candidates, are being coordinated to covertly control who wins. The claim braids together two things that should be kept separate. One is documented and real: generative AI tools have a well-recorded habit of producing false election information, and synthetic media impersonating candidates has genuinely circulated, both of which election officials and security agencies treat as serious threats to information integrity. The other is the rated conspiracy: that this amounts to a single coordinated covert scheme to secretly predetermine the 2026 result. This file states the record plainly and with sources, then explains why the leap to a centralized rigging operation is, on the public evidence, unproven. It attributes every allegation as an allegation, names no culprit, and accuses no one of a crime.
Read the case file →California keeps counting ballots until the Democrat wins, and the 2026 Los Angeles mayoral count was manipulated to deny a Republican the runoff
When the Los Angeles mayoral primary count stretched past a week in June 2026 and a candidate who had led for the second runoff spot fell behind, a familiar explanation arrived: California must be counting until it gets the answer it wants. This case file separates the parts. The lead genuinely did change, the count genuinely was slow, and both have documented causes written into California election law. What is not supported is the claim that the delay is a mechanism for manufacturing outcomes. The story has an unusual wrinkle that makes it worth its own entry: some of the accounts driving the fraud claim were being paid to post by the very betting markets whose shifting odds they cited as evidence, and those companies pulled the posts when journalists started asking.
Read the case file →Caught on camera: the confrontation videos circulating as real security footage and bystander clips are documentary evidence of things that happened
A clip arrives with no context and a caption in the first person. A landlord forced her way into my home. A father knocks out the man who followed his daughter from school. A police officer refuses to pay for a coffee. The framing is always the same: this is footage, somebody's camera happened to be running, and you are seeing what occurred. In four cases checked during a single week in August 2026, across the United States, Thailand and Brazil, it was not footage of anything. It was scripted entertainment, made by production companies and skit channels that labelled their own work, and then stripped of that labelling by whoever posted it next. One case shows the step happening: the original carries a studio watermark in the corner, and the viral repost has the watermark blurred out. Running alongside it is a stranger second genre, in which AI generates fake behind-the-scenes footage of film crews building disasters on miniature sets. That one matters more than it looks, because it manufactures precisely the artifact that every staged-event conspiracy theory has always asked for and never had.
Read the case file →Christopher Nolan's The Odyssey is secretly failing, its box office and Rotten Tomatoes scores manipulated to hide a flop
Christopher Nolan's The Odyssey opened in July 2026 to the biggest worldwide launch of his career and one of the highest audience scores Rotten Tomatoes has ever recorded. Almost immediately, a counter-narrative formed online: that the movie is really a flop, and that the grosses and glowing scores are manipulated to disguise it. The centerpiece was a viral claim that Rotten Tomatoes was hiding the 'real' audience score, said to be around 56 percent, behind an inflated 97 percent. This case file keeps the verified record (a record opening, verified high scores, a real pre-release backlash, and a viral rigging claim) apart from the claim it rates (that the success is fabricated). On that claim, the verdict is debunked: theatrical grosses are reported independently by rival trades from shared tracking data, and the score 'gap' is a known, deliberate design of Rotten Tomatoes' verified-audience system, and does not signal a cover-up.
Read the case file →Congress voted to merge the United States military with Israel's, placing American forces under foreign command
In July 2026 a claim spread quickly that Congress had voted to merge the American and Israeli armed forces. The underlying legislation is real and the fight over it is real: a provision creating a United States-Israel Defense Technology Cooperation Initiative survived a bipartisan revolt and a 216 to 212 House vote, and Senate Democrats blocked a motion to advance their chamber's version. What the provision does not do is create a joint military. This case file separates the documented legislative record, including the substantial and legitimate opposition to the provision, from the merger claim itself, which fact-checkers examined and rated false.
Read the case file →Conspiracy narratives claiming that the January 2026 US military operation that captured Venezuelan leader Nicolás Maduro was secretly staged or pre-arranged, rather than the real special-operations raid documented by the US government and international press, are unproven and unsupported by the evidence
In the early hours of 3 January 2026, US forces struck targets across northern Venezuela and captured President Nicolás Maduro and his wife, Cilia Flores, at a compound in Caracas in an operation the Trump administration named Operation Absolute Resolve. Maduro and Flores were flown to New York, arraigned in a Manhattan federal court on 5 January on narco-terrorism and drug-trafficking charges that they denied, and Vice President Delcy Rodríguez was installed as Venezuela's acting leader. The raid is documented and officially confirmed. What is not established is a fast-spreading online narrative that the whole thing was staged, fabricated, or secretly arranged in advance. This file separates the documented operation from that conspiracy layer. It reports what governments, courts, and reputable press have confirmed; explains why a chaotic, image-poor first day was fertile ground for hoaxes; and summarizes findings by disinformation researchers that Russia- and China-linked networks amplified the confusion. It takes no side on the contested politics and asserts no one's guilt.
Read the case file →Discoveries are being made across the United States that rewrite American history: Roman battle helmets under a North Carolina golf course, Dead Sea Scrolls in a Tennessee cliff face, evidence that the Old World reached America long before anyone admits
In April 2026 a video went around saying Roman battle helmets had been dug up on a North Carolina golf course, alongside swords, spears and Native American arrowheads, apparently the wreckage of a battle that would rewrite American history. In July the same creator, Scott Whitehead, posted videos about hikers finding Dead Sea Scrolls-like documents in a Tennessee cliff face. Both are inventions. The first was an April Fools' joke, the second sits on accounts that describe their own output as parody, and the dramatic cliff footage in the Tennessee video was filmed at Pinara in southwestern Turkey. Snopes checked the first in April and the second in August. What makes the pair worth a file is not that a comedian made things up: it is that the jokes carry their own punchlines on the surface, an expert called Dr. Reemy Deemy, a cousin consulted at the PetSmart fish counter, and people believed them anyway. That happens because the underlying story is not new. Americans have been told for two centuries that somebody else built the ancient works of North America, and this is what that idea looks like when it comes back as content.
Read the case file →Federal agents ran an undercover operation against protest organisers, climate groups and labour unions in Minnesota, infiltrating meetings in churches and libraries and pulling union financial records
On 13 August 2026 a defence lawyer in a Minnesota federal case filed a motion asking for more of the material investigators had gathered. Attached to it were government documents describing an operation nobody outside it had heard of. Homeland Security Investigations had run a programme called Operation Puppet Master, aimed at what officials described as a network of conspirators assisting violent opportunists and agitators, and a later effort called Project Whipple Shield. According to the records, undercover officers sat in on organising meetings in churches, schools, libraries and parks; agents monitored activist chat groups and used licence plates to work out who had attended; and the government pulled years of financial records on labour unions and campaign groups, asking a Federal Reserve transfer system not to disclose the request for an indefinite period. One slide, headed 'The Conspiracy', mapped 18 organisations including a bicycle repair collective and the largest federation of unions in the country. Most files on this site rate a claim that outran its evidence. This one is the other kind: a conspiracy chart that exists, drawn by a federal agency, and now sitting in a court file.
Read the case file →India's Cockroach Janta Party protests were not an organic student movement but a foreign-backed influence operation, run with Pakistani bot followers, US funding, and an opposition toolkit
In May 2026 the Chief Justice of India, Surya Kant, said during a Supreme Court hearing that there were 'youngsters like cockroaches' who could not find employment, and referred to 'parasites' attacking the system. Within a day a political communications strategist, Abhijeet Dipke, had registered a satirical website calling itself the Cockroach Janta Party, styled as the voice of the lazy and unemployed. It was a joke that stopped being one. Fed by allegations that the NEET-UG medical entrance paper had leaked and by the cancellation and re-sit that followed, the CJP became a mass movement, out-followed the governing party on Instagram, filled Jantar Mantar from 6 June, and ended on 25 July with the education minister's resignation. Running alongside it the whole way was a second story: that none of this was real. Versions held that the followers were Pakistani bots, that the money was American, that an opposition leader was secretly behind the account, and that a leaked toolkit showed the outrage was manufactured. This file keeps the two apart. That the protests happened, and that this counter-narrative was pushed at them, are both documented. The counter-narrative itself is what gets rated, and each of its load-bearing claims has been checked and found false.
Read the case file →Israel, working through Morocco, engineered the July 2026 mass crossing into Ceuta to punish Spain for its criticism of the war in Gaza
On 30 July 2026, between 50,000 and 60,000 people crossed from Morocco into the Spanish city of Ceuta. Spain declared an emergency and at least 72 people died. The causes were on the public record within days: a Spanish Supreme Court ruling of 8 July that smuggling networks distorted and marketed, the state of Spanish-Moroccan relations, and a decade of pressure on Europe's asylum system. That is not the story that spread. Within hours, a false claim took hold that Israel had engineered the crossing, using Morocco as an instrument, to punish Spain for condemning the war in Gaza. Researchers at the Combat Antisemitism Movement's Antisemitism Research Center counted 173 high-impact posts from 119 named influencer accounts in the first 72 hours, generating 57.5 million views and an estimated reach of 103.1 million. The evidence offered was manufactured: a threat attributed to Benjamin Netanyahu that appears nowhere but the post that invented it, a claim of a Mossad admission sourced to a labelled parody account, and a statement invented for the actor Javier Bardem, who said no such thing. This file reports the claim as the antisemitic hoax it is. Both governments concerned have publicly contradicted it, no evidence for it exists, and its structure is a direct descendant of the Kalergi Plan and great replacement libels.
Read the case file →James Franco filmed a real alien or creature in his garage and is being watched because of it
In June 2026, James Franco, 48, quietly started a TikTok account and began posting a string of cryptic, low-lit videos. He insisted he was really himself and not promoting anything, then claimed that a creature with glowing eyes, something he described as not human, was lurking in the garage where he paints, and that he believed he was being watched or followed. He promised his followers he would keep filming to prove it and later shared grainy black-and-white footage of a shape moving through his yard. The clips racked up millions of views and set off a wave of alien and conspiracy chatter, memes, and some sincere worry. This case file keeps two things apart: the videos were posted and widely reported, which is on the record; and the claim it actually rates, that a real alien or creature and a real surveillance plot exist as described. On the available evidence, no literal creature or plot has been shown; the range of ordinary explanations, from a deliberate bit to earnest belief, is not something we presume to adjudicate about a living person.
Read the case file →Major retailers are quietly running clearance offers almost nobody knows about: a Dyson for £8.55, a Samsung S25 Ultra given away to Facebook users, a designer perfume for £3, all available if you complete a short survey
In the first ten days of August 2026 the UK fact-checking charity Full Fact debunked four separate viral offers in the name of well-known retailers: a Dyson Cyclone V10 from Currys for £8.55, Samsung S25 Ultras being given away by Currys to Facebook users, Makita display drill sets from Screwfix for under a tenner, and a full-size bottle of Maison Francis Kurkdjian Baccarat Rouge 540 from John Lewis for £3. Currys and John Lewis both told Full Fact directly that the offers were not theirs. The posts share a script: they are written in the first person, they attribute inside knowledge to a relative who supposedly works at the shop, they explain the impossible price as display or clearance stock, and they route you to a survey. This file rates the offers, which are fabrications, and documents what the posts are actually built to do, which is not to sell you a vacuum cleaner.
Read the case file →Manufacturers are printing the name of God on things people tread on, sit on, or throw away: a deliberate insult hidden in the decoration of ordinary consumer goods
In August 2026 a claim spread through Sri Lankan social media that sandals sold under the local Hikkaduwa brand were printed with the name of God in Arabic, meaning that anyone wearing them was treading on it. In a country where religious rumours have turned violent before, that is close to the most combustible thing a post can say. Fact Crescendo examined it and came back with an answer more complicated than either side wanted. The design does contain Arabic calligraphy, and both an Arabic-language expert and Sri Lanka's main body of Islamic scholars confirmed as much. But the manufacturer said the artwork had been lifted from a Pinterest image labelled only as Arabic calligraphy, the fact-checkers found the matching image, and the company changed the design inside a day and issued a public apology. This file rates the accusation of deliberate insult, which does not hold, and records what does: a decorative pattern nobody in the supply chain could read, printed on a shoe.
Read the case file →Many viral 'moments' from the 2026 FIFA World Cup were fabricated: an AI image of Benjamin Netanyahu in an Argentina shirt, a face-swapped 'Haaland reacting to his reflection' clip, invented player backstories and fake quotes were all passed off as real
The 2026 World Cup was the first men's tournament held after cheap, photorealistic AI video and image tools reached the mainstream, and it showed. Alongside real matches, feeds filled with clips and pictures presented as genuine World Cup moments that were nothing of the kind: an AI image of Benjamin Netanyahu cheering Argentina from the stands (he was hosting meetings in Jerusalem that day), a viral 'Haaland reacting to his reflection' video that turned out to be a face-swapped Chinese comedy skit, invented player quotes and backstories, and, after Spain beat Argentina in the final, fabricated images used to claim the result was rigged. Fact-checking teams at Lead Stories, Euronews' The Cube, the European Broadcasting Union, AFP, Misbar, NewsGuard and public broadcasters traced each to its real origin, often using reverse image search, provenance checks and watermark detectors such as Google's SynthID and OpenAI's verification tool. This file catalogues the documented fakes and keeps the real tournament and its results strictly separate from the synthetic media that rode on its back.
Read the case file →Musician Oliver Tree faked his own death and the Rio helicopter crash was a publicity stunt
On 14 June 2026, two helicopters collided in mid-air over Rio de Janeiro, killing six people. Among the dead was Oliver Tree, the 32-year-old American singer, rapper, and comedic performance artist known for 'Hurt,' 'Miss You,' and an elaborately ironic public persona. His death was confirmed by authorities after remains were identified. Within days, a conspiracy theory spread across TikTok and X claiming Tree had faked his death: as a publicity stunt in keeping with his prankster image, or to escape a dispute with his record label. Believers point to a cluster of numerology 'clues,' a so-called '33 theory' tying him to Kobe Bryant and Juice WRLD, a '6:14' reading of the crash date, and rumors of an 'Antarctica' project. This file treats the claim as what the sourcing shows it to be: a debunked faked-death hoax layered onto a real, confirmed tragedy.
Read the case file →New UNICEF child malnutrition data proves the Gaza famine never happened and that the famine declaration was a fabrication
In August 2026 a set of figures began circulating with the claim that UNICEF had quietly dismantled the story of famine in Gaza. The posts carried a table showing acute child malnutrition in Gaza at rates lower than Egypt, Jordan, Syria and even some European countries, and the framing was blunt: these are not Israeli figures, this is the United Nations own data, so the famine was a lie. The figures are authentic. They come from a nutrition survey run to standard World Health Organization methodology and presented at a UN-led coordination meeting on 22 July 2026. What the posts leave out is everything that happened between the two dates they are implicitly comparing. Famine was confirmed in Gaza Governorate in August 2025 by the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification, a ceasefire followed in October, and aid was scaled up on a scale the territory had not seen: nutrition coverage for children under five rose from below 1 per cent to 60 per cent in twenty months. UNICEF told Snopes plainly that both findings stand and that the fall in malnutrition is a result of the assistance delivered in between. The claim rated here is the inference, not the arithmetic: that a low malnutrition rate measured after a large intervention shows the emergency that prompted the intervention was invented.
Read the case file →Senator Lindsey Graham was assassinated by a foreign power, and the true cause of his death is being covered up
On the evening of Saturday, 11 July 2026, Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, 71, collapsed at his Washington home and could not be revived. His office described a brief and sudden illness. The District of Columbia chief medical examiner's preliminary finding was an aortic dissection, a tear in the aorta, caused by arteriosclerotic cardiovascular disease, with no indication of foul play. Because Graham had returned only days earlier from a trip to Ukraine and was a hawkish figure with many foreign adversaries, his death was immediately met with a wave of claims that he had been assassinated or poisoned by a hostile state and that the real story was being suppressed. This case file keeps two things apart: on one side a natural, well-understood cardiovascular catastrophe in an elderly man; on the other the claim we actually rate, a concealed foreign hit. On the evidence, the assassination claim is debunked, while the ordinary caveat that final toxicology is still pending is treated as the open detail it is, not as a smoking gun.
Read the case file →Taylor Farms bought its way out of food-safety enforcement, donating to a Trump-aligned committee so its lettuce would never be inspected and so the rule that would have caught the 2026 cyclospora outbreak would be shelved
In July 2026 a cyclospora outbreak sickened nearly 2,000 people who had eaten at Taco Bell locations across nine states, and the FDA traced it to shredded iceberg lettuce packed in central Mexico by Taylor Farms. Those were the figures when the claim below took hold; a widened case definition on 5 August put the confirmed toll at 6,358 illnesses across fifteen states, with 278 hospitalisations and two deaths. Within days a second story attached itself to the first. Posts pointed out that Taylor Fresh Foods had given 1 million dollars to a Trump-aligned political committee, and that the donation landed six days after the FDA proposed delaying a food traceability rule by 30 months. The conclusion drawn was that the company had paid for regulatory protection. This file keeps the outbreak and that inference apart. The outbreak, the recall, and the donation are all documented, the last of them in public Federal Election Commission filings. The inference is not. Snopes ran the records twice and declined to rate the claim, and the strongest versions of it misstate what the rule actually does: it requires producers to keep tracking records, not the government to inspect lettuce. The company has denied nothing publicly beyond restating its food-safety spending, and the department overseeing the FDA has said its decisions turn on science alone. We report the theory and the record. We do not allege that anyone committed a crime, and nobody has been shown to have done so.
Read the case file →The 'Stranger Things' finale was a fake, and a secret real ending is being hidden by Netflix
When Stranger Things ended its fifth and final season over the 2025 holidays, some fans refused to accept the finale as the real ending. A theory called 'Conformity Gate' held that the episode viewers saw was itself an illusion created by the villain Vecna, that the audience had been placed inside one of his fabrications, and that a secret 'true' finale was coming on January 7, 2026. Believers pointed to gown colors, a doorknob on the wrong side, a dial that changes shade, and cassette tapes said to spell a Morse-code message. This case file keeps two things apart: a viral theory, a 390,000-signature petition, a creator's denial; and the claim it rates, that a real hidden ending is being concealed. On that claim, the verdict is debunked.
Read the case file →The 2025–2026 screwworm outbreak reaching the US was a deliberately released bioweapon or a Gates/Oxitec genetic attack on the cattle herd
The claim that the New World screwworm's arrival in US livestock in 2025–2026 was no natural event but a deliberate act: a bioweapon released to sabotage the American cattle herd and food supply, a genetic attack tied to Bill Gates or the biotech firm Oxitec, or (in a partisan variant) an outbreak caused by DOGE budget cuts. A real, serious parasite resurgence sits underneath the story, along with a real sterile-insect eradication program and real supply and border worries. The intentional-attack reading laid over those facts is unsupported.
Read the case file →The 2026 Andes-hantavirus outbreak aboard the MV Hondius was a lab-made bioweapon, a staged 'plandemic', or a vaccine side effect
In the spring of 2026 a cluster of Andes-hantavirus infections was linked to the Dutch-flagged expedition cruise ship MV Hondius. It was a genuine, unsettling public-health event, and it was over quickly: the World Health Organization declared the outbreak ended on 2 July 2026. Almost immediately, though, a second outbreak ran alongside the first, an outbreak of conspiracy theories. Within days, viral posts recast the cluster as a lab-made bioweapon, a staged 'plandemic' and 'Covid 2.0' complete with 'crisis actors', a hidden consequence of Pfizer and Moderna mRNA vaccines, and a disease supposedly curable with ivermectin. A separate, false, antisemitic claim held that 'hanta' means 'fake' in Hebrew and so the whole thing was an Israeli hoax. This case file reports those claims, explains why fact-checkers and health authorities found each one false, and, without repeating the smear as if it were true, names the antisemitic version for what it is. It is not medical advice; it is an account of what the record shows.
Read the case file →The 2026 Democratic Republic of the Congo Ebola outbreak is a hoax, or a disease deliberately introduced by NGOs, aid workers, and foreigners
On 14 May 2026 the Democratic Republic of the Congo declared its 17th Ebola outbreak, in Ituri Province, about five months after the previous one ended. Caused by the Bundibugyo species of the virus, it spread through eastern DRC and reached Uganda; by 31 August the official count stood at 6,041 cases and 2,911 deaths, making it the largest Ebola outbreak recorded in the DRC and the second-largest anywhere, with the WHO cautioning the real toll could be far higher. Alongside the epidemic ran a second contagion: rumors that Ebola is a hoax, that the disease does not exist, or that it was deliberately brought in by NGOs, aid workers, or foreigners, whether for money, to depopulate the region, or to justify outside intervention. Those rumors have done measurable harm, from residents burning Ebola treatment tents in Rwampara to attacks that burned isolation facilities in Mongbwalu. This case file keeps the documented outbreak strictly separate from the conspiracy claims, explains honestly why the distrust exists without endorsing the conspiracy, and reports what health authorities have established. It is not medical advice.
Read the case file →The 2026 federal seizures of 2020 ballots and voting machines are uncovering the fraud that stole the election
In early 2026 the federal government took two unprecedented actions around long-settled election claims. On January 28 the FBI raided Fulton County, Georgia's election operations center and seized more than 650 boxes of original 2020 ballots, images, tabulator tapes, and voter rolls; days later it emerged that the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, under Tulsi Gabbard, had obtained and forensically examined voting machines from Puerto Rico. Supporters framed both as the beginning of the end for a cover-up: proof, at last, that the 2020 election was stolen and that the machinery of fraud was about to be exposed. This case file separates the documented record, the seizures happened and are being fought in court, from the rated claim, that they are uncovering real election fraud. On the evidence, that claim is debunked: the 2020 Georgia result was checked three separate ways, the affidavit behind the raid recycled complaints the state had already found did not change the count, and the intelligence review turned up no foreign hack. The file names no fraud because the record establishes none.
Read the case file →The 2026 FIFA World Cup is scripted, with a predetermined champion hidden in the tournament's official colours
Ahead of the 2026 World Cup, co-hosted by the United States, Canada and Mexico, a theory raced across TikTok claiming that FIFA fixes the tournament in advance and hides the answer in plain sight. The proof, believers said, is colour: each recent World Cup's official palette supposedly matches the eventual winner's flag, Germany in 2014, France in 2018, Argentina in 2022. Reading the 2026 brand's reds and greens, the theory named Portugal the champion it said had been chosen years ago. Three things in that story are real: a viral claim did spread, FIFA does use a colour system, and FIFA does have a corruption history. The part being rated here is the other part, that the result is decided ahead of time and encoded in the branding. That part is false, and the tournament itself went on to prove it: Portugal was knocked out in the Round of 16, and the final was Spain against Argentina.
Read the case file →The 2026 government UAP disclosure is a managed release designed to conceal proof of non-human craft
In 2026 the US government began, for the first time, to release a large body of historical UAP records to the public through a dedicated portal (war.gov/UFO), the Presidential Unsealing and Reporting System for UAP Encounters, or PURSUE. The Pentagon's All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO) reports that most of its case holdings remain unresolved, Congress keeps adding UAP disclosure mandates to the annual defense bill, and a whistleblower has told a House hearing under oath that the United States runs a secret craft-retrieval program. The rated claim reads all of this one way: the government is releasing material precisely because it is concealing proof of non-human craft, and the real evidence is still hidden. This case file separates what is documented (a genuine, ongoing declassification effort and a real backlog of unexplained cases) from that conclusion (confirmed alien technology), which remains unproven.
Read the case file →The 2026 MLB Home Run Derby was scripted, and a leaked Netflix graphic naming Jordan Walker champion before the final ended proves the result was fixed
The 2026 Home Run Derby was Netflix's first, staged at Citizens Bank Park in Philadelphia on July 14. As the field narrowed, viewers caught a lower-third graphic in the corner of the screen that already crowned St. Louis Cardinals slugger Jordan Walker the '2026 T-Mobile Home Run Derby Champion,' before the outcome was decided. Walker then went on to win, beating hometown favorite Kyle Schwarber 12-11 in the final, and social media erupted: the script had leaked, and the whole thing was fixed. This case file keeps two things apart: a real broadcast graphic that appeared too early, and a real Walker win; and the claim it rates, that the graphic proves a predetermined result. On that claim, the verdict is debunked: it was a graphics gaffe, not a leaked script.
Read the case file →The 2026 White House Correspondents' Dinner shooting was staged or deliberately allowed to happen
On the night of 25 April 2026, shots were fired at the White House Correspondents' Association dinner in Washington. According to the Justice Department and contemporaneous reporting, an armed man rushed the event as officers were breaking down security screening, a federal officer wearing a bullet-resistant vest was hit by buckshot and was expected to recover, and President Trump was hurried off the stage while guests took cover. A suspect, Cole Tomas Allen, 31, was arrested and charged with attempting to assassinate the president; he pleaded not guilty and is presumed innocent pending trial. Within hours, a conspiracy claim spread that the whole thing had been staged or theatrically arranged, in a rival version, that it was real but deliberately permitted. This case file separates the record from that claim. On the evidence assembled by investigators and reviewed by fact-checkers, the staged and deliberately-allowed claims are debunked. The security operation raised real and serious questions, but a documented failure is not the same as a proven plot.
Read the case file →The announcement is official: a graphic carrying a ministry's, a broadcaster's or a company's house style speaks for that institution
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 vaccine release, a price. Each borrows the visual grammar an institution uses for its own genuine announcements, and each was fabricated. In the week of 17 August 2026 alone, Africa Check rated four of them across Kenya and South Africa, Lead Stories rated four counterfeit news outlets across the United Kingdom, Germany, Italy and the United States, and Boatos rated a Brazilian public health message built around the mascot of the national immunisation programme. What connects them is not a technology. It is that institutions now publish real announcements in exactly this form, as a shareable image with a logo on it, so the counterfeit and the genuine article are the same object. This file rates the assumption that the house style is the proof, and on this record it does not hold.
Read the case file →The beef is not what the label says: a sudden rush of tariff-free imports is covering for horse meat, for shipments other countries rejected, and for a deliberate squeeze on American ranching
The American cattle herd is the smallest it has been since 1951, and beef demand has risen about 9% over the past decade. Prices followed. On 21 August 2026 the president announced on Truth Social that up to 300,000 metric tons of product for ground beef would be allowed in tariff-free for 90 days, and a proclamation on 26 August set the start date at 1 September. Asked by a reporter where the beef would come from, he declined to name the countries and said it would be high quality. Within two days, TikTok posts were tying the plan to reporting about wild horses reaching slaughter and telling people to stop buying beef immediately in case it was horse meat. Others said a USDA recall of Argentine beef had exposed the scheme, and that the US was absorbing shipments China had rejected as contaminated. The USDA says horse meat is not imported for human consumption and cannot legally be sold as beef. The recall happened on 7 August, two weeks before the plan existed. China rejected one Argentine shipment in February and kept buying. What remains true is narrower and more interesting: nobody has said where the beef is from.
Read the case file →The communal violence in Nepal's Madhesh is the work of outsiders: Rohingya refugees behind the carnage, crowds of Muslims arriving from India for revenge, and videos showing Nepali youth burning down illegal mosques
On 26 July 2026 a Bol Bam procession carrying holy water from the Koshi Barrage was making its way toward Kaptangunj Chowk in Sunsari District, in Nepal's eastern Terai. Accounts of what happened next differ and remain contested. What is not contested is the outcome: stone-throwing between two crowds, security forces caught between them, and eventually live ammunition. Three people died, all shot, and the unrest spread across Madhesh Province before curfews brought it down. Almost immediately a second story began travelling alongside the first, and it was about outsiders: Rohingya refugees said to be behind it, Muslims said to be crossing from India in numbers to retaliate, and video said to show Nepali young people burning illegal mosques. Two of those videos have now been traced. Both are Indian, both are from other years, and they point in opposite directions. This file keeps the documented record and the rated claims apart, and rates only the second.
Read the case file →The crew of the USS Abraham Lincoln is being silenced and killed aboard a carrier the Navy will not bring home, and the president has ordered sailors to sign non-disclosure agreements and called them suckers and losers
In November 2025 the aircraft carrier USS Abraham Lincoln left San Diego on what was described as a routine deployment. It was redirected to the Arabian Sea after the war with Iran began, and it did not come home in May 2026 as planned. By July it had set a record for consecutive days at sea; by early August it had been out more than 259 days with a crew of around 5,000. Reporting from the BBC, Stars and Stripes and CNN has described food shortages, broken plumbing and mounting strain, and lawmakers have asked questions; the Defense Secretary dismissed an earlier round of the same reporting as fake news, and the Navy says it has not observed an increase in suicidal ideations or attempts aboard. That argument is real, and this file does not settle it. What this file rates is the cluster of fabrications that grew on top of it in a single week of August 2026: a satirical post about mandatory non-disclosure agreements that lost its label and was taken as news, a forged screenshot of a presidential post calling servicemembers suckers and losers, and a claim from Iranian state media that seven sailors had died in a brawl, which US Central Command denied. Those three are the claim rated here, and they do not hold up. Snopes has since published a standing collection of the Lincoln claims it has examined, which is a fair measure of how much has attached itself to one ship.
Read the case file →The deadly June 2026 Venezuela earthquakes were not natural but were triggered on purpose by a laser or directed-energy weapon, with viral clips of scanning red beams and collapsing towers offered as proof
On June 24, 2026, two powerful earthquakes struck northern Venezuela within about 39 seconds of each other, killing thousands and flattening buildings across several states. Almost immediately, a second story grew on top of the real one: that the quakes were not natural at all but were fired off deliberately by a laser or directed-energy weapon, with some posts blaming a US 'geographic weapon' and others the HAARP research facility in Alaska. The supposed evidence went viral, red beams scanning the ground, towers crashing together, buildings folding in clouds of dust. This file keeps the real disaster and its victims separate from the rated claims, and rates both of those claims debunked. Earthquakes are tectonic events; seismologists say no technology can trigger one of this size on command, and fact-checkers traced every headline clip to AI generation, a video game, old demolitions, and footage that predated the quake by months or years.
Read the case file →The European Union is building a censorship grid over the internet: an 'internet passport' will be required before anyone can go online, VPNs are to be banned so nobody can escape it, and the AI Act completes the control system
Through 2026 a set of claims spread across European and English-language social media holding that Brussels was about to close the open internet: that an 'internet passport' would soon be required before anyone could go online, that VPNs would be banned so the requirement could not be evaded, and that the AI Act supplied the censorship machinery to finish the job. Individual posts were viewed millions of times. Each claim points at something real and then misdescribes it. The passport is an age-verification app the Commission is building so that platforms can keep children away from age-restricted material; a user verifies their age once with an official document and afterwards proves only that they are above a threshold, and it does not gate the internet. The VPN ban does not exist: a Commission official said the goal is making age checks harder to circumvent, and her office said flatly there is no crackdown on VPNs and no proposal targeting them. The AI Act obligations that took effect on 2 August 2026 are a disclosure rule requiring deepfakes to be labelled as artificial, not a takedown power. There are real arguments to have about all three, and digital-rights groups are having them. This file rates the viral version, and the viral version is false.
Read the case file →The footage going round after a disaster shows the disaster: clips circulating in the first hours after a flood, quake or landslide document the event they are captioned with
On 26 August 2026 a landslide and flash flood struck the Nepal-China border. Full Fact recorded more than 547 dead two days later; CBS News, cited by Snopes, put the toll at almost 600 with around 2,500 missing; a week later Reuters put the Nepali dead at 1,114, with nearly 4,000 missing across both sides of the border. Within hours the internet filled with footage. Almost none of it was from Nepal. Over the following six days Lead Stories, Fact Crescendo, Full Fact, Factly and Boatos published roughly twenty debunks between them: an AI-generated bridge collapse, before-and-after damage images made with OpenAI tools, a fighter jet supposedly causing the floods whose source clip had been online since May carrying an AI watermark, women staged as flood victims, rescue footage from the Congo in 2023, a landslide in Japan, an excavator swept away in Uttarakhand, a man trapped in debris in Prayagraj, a Buddha statue from 2024, a child rescue from 2024, and a flood scene lifted from an Indonesian television drama. Meanwhile Snopes rated something real. The CCTV of the water destroying the Gyirong Port crossing, which commenters under an X post with more than thirteen million views had confidently called AI, was authentic, and the Associated Press had reached the same conclusion. This file rates the assumption that footage in circulation during a disaster is footage of that disaster.
Read the case file →The insiders break it first: viral 'REPORT:' posts about signings, firings and transfers are real sports journalism running ahead of the mainstream press
A post appears. It opens with 'REPORT:' in capitals, it is written in the clipped house style of a real insider, it names a source you have heard of, and it says the thing you have been waiting to hear about your team. Then it turns out that nobody employed the person who wrote it. Between 9 and 12 August 2026 three of these ran at once: Russell Westbrook was signing in Israel, the Indiana Fever had fired Stephanie White, Galatasaray had landed Jamal Musiala. All three were false, and all three failed the same simple test, which is that no credible outlet was carrying them. What makes the cluster worth a file rather than three footnotes is the mechanism underneath. The accounts had almost no followers. What they had was somebody else's name: The Athletic in the body of one post, an actual WNBA team in the handle of another. The credibility is not built, it is cited, and one of the outlets whose name got used ended up republishing the story back.
Read the case file →The man who accepted an honorary Cesar in Paris in 2026 was not the real Jim Carrey but a clone, body double, or a prosthetics-wearing impersonator
On February 26, 2026, Jim Carrey, 64, accepted an honorary Cesar d'honneur at the 51st Cesar Awards in Paris. He looked older and different than fans remembered, fuller in the face, smoother, with longer hair, and over the weekend a crowd on TikTok and X decided the man on stage could not be him. Some said clone; some said body double; and after the drag and prosthetics artist Alexis Stone posted a hyper-realistic Carrey mask captioned 'Alexis Stone as Jim Carrey in Paris,' many said a masked impersonator. The claim is baseless. The Cesar organizers confirmed it was really Carrey, a visit planned for months; his publicist confirmed his attendance; and a prosthetics expert said he wore no mask. This case file keeps two things apart: a real online rumor circulated and Carrey has aged; the claim it rates is that he was literally swapped for a duplicate. On the science and the evidence, that claim is debunked, and the wave it started became the template for the celebrity-clone theories that followed.
Read the case file →The Patriot Front march through Washington on July 4, 2026 was staged: the masked white-nationalist marchers were really antifa or federal agents in costume, and the day's viral videos prove the whole thing was faked
On July 4, 2026, about 400 members of Patriot Front, a white-nationalist group founded after the 2017 Charlottesville rally, marched through central Washington during the America 250 festivities, masked and carrying American and Confederate flags. The march itself was widely reported by mainstream outlets. What followed was a scramble of disinformation pulling in two directions at once. On one side, a denialist claim spread that the whole thing was staged, that the marchers were antifa or federal agents in costume, and that the footage was fake; Fox News host Laura Ingraham gave it a push by calling the video 'fake' and 'Antifa in costume'. On the other side, AI-generated videos were passed off as authentic footage from the day, most notably a fabricated 'ABC7 breaking news' clip of furries chasing a Patriot Front member and a separate 'before Patriot Front' video derived from a real Reuters photo. Snopes debunked the 'it was faked' claim, and Lead Stories traced the viral clips to AI tools. This case file keeps the record, that a real hate-group march occurred, distinct from the two claims it rates, that the march was staged and that the AI clips were real. On the evidence, both of those claims are debunked. The episode is a clean case study in the 'liar's dividend': once enough fakes are circulating, people learn to wave away real events as fake, and a documented white-nationalist march becomes something a national broadcaster can dismiss with a single word.
Read the case file →The president's stated reason for changing planes in Ankara was a cover story, and the aircraft the press and staff flew home on was a decoy
Most files here rate a claim that outran its evidence. This one runs the other way. On 8 July 2026 the president left a NATO summit in Ankara and announced he would take the old Air Force One home instead of the new Qatari-donated jet, for old time's sake. Reporters watched him climb the stairs. A catering truck was parked on the far side of the aircraft, and a few minutes later it drove away to another government plane. According to the Washington Post, which broke the story on 10 August, and to the New York Times and CBS News, which matched it citing their own officials, the president was in that truck. He flew to Britain on a separate aircraft while the press pool and some of his own staff crossed the same route on the plane they believed he was on, with the window shades in the press cabin closed. CBS reports an official saying US intelligence had picked up a credible plot to fire a missile at his departing aircraft. The documented record is the deception operation and its reported reason. What this file rates is the narrower claim that the announced reason for the plane change was a cover story, and on the reporting that is substantiated. It is not an allegation of wrongdoing against anyone, and this file makes none.
Read the case file →The quote is real and the photograph is real: statements and images circulating with a public figure's name on them are things they actually said and did
A screenshot of a quotation. A photograph of a politician in a T-shirt with a slogan on it. A clip of two familiar faces talking to children. Each arrives already attributed, needing nothing from the reader but recognition of the name. In six days in August 2026, fact-checkers rated eight of these across the United States and Britain and every one was manufactured. The techniques are what make the cluster worth a page rather than eight footnotes, because they have almost nothing in common: one photograph was altered, one was generated whole, one quotation was invented and put in a third party's mouth about the target, two were written as first-person statements the subjects never made, and one was an AI video of a conversation that never happened. Underneath sits a harder pattern than any single case shows. One account was found to have fabricated statements for the same person twice, months apart. Several producers openly label their output as satire and the label falls away at the first share. And the sexualised strand of this, which targets women in public life far more than men, is documented well enough to be counted: 100 incidents across 14 countries, 92 of them since 2022.
Read the case file →The screenshot proves they posted it: a circulating image of a public figure's social media post is reliable evidence that the post was made
A screenshot of a post looks like documentation. It is not; it is a picture, and pictures of text are trivial to make. The week of 25 to 31 August 2026 showed what that now costs. Lead Stories ruled that the president's account had not posted an image of him walking on water captioned Pastor, President, Protector; had not posted a mess hall picture, itself AI-generated, captioned about the military eating the best; had not announced a Melania Canal to bypass the Welland Canal, a fabrication traced to a satire account; and had not threatened to close New York's 9/11 memorial. In the same stretch it confirmed that a post about Kharg Island was genuine, and that it carried an AI-generated video of a strike no reporting supports. Snopes, meanwhile, published a collection titled around two dozen things the president actually posted, drawn from its archives, noting it routinely traces alleged posts to people with editing skills. Among the genuine items is an AI image of himself as the Pope. That is why the obvious test fails: when the real account posts outlandish and synthetic material, outlandishness stops being evidence of forgery.
Read the case file →The Spokane Complex fires were set deliberately to clear cheap land for a massive AI data centre, with the burn area matching the development site
Three fires broke out around Spokane, Washington on 1 August 2026 and became the most destructive in the county's history. Within two days, posts were arguing that they had been set to clear cheap land for a planned AI data centre, pointing to what they said was a match between the burn area and the development site. This file keeps the disaster and the claim apart. The disaster is real, and so is the local argument about data centres, which residents have been contesting at the county commission over noise, health, energy and water. The claim that the fires were lit to serve that development is false, and the clearest reason is a matter of public record that the posts do not mention: six weeks before the fires, the city council had already banned new data-centre applications for a year. Add a documented extreme-wind warning issued before the fires started, a criminal charge over the largest blaze with no data-centre connection found, and a sheriff's assessment that another was likely accidental, and the motive the theory depends on has nowhere to sit. This file accuses nobody and treats the person charged as presumed innocent.
Read the case file →The sudden ten-day shutdown of El Paso's airspace in February 2026 was cover for a catastrophe the government has never disclosed
Late on a Tuesday night in February 2026 the Federal Aviation Administration closed the sky over El Paso and southern New Mexico for ten days and gave a three-word reason: special security reasons. El Paso International Airport, a regional hub, effectively shut. It was the first sudden security closure of American airspace since the September 11 attacks, and for several hours nobody outside government could say why. Then the order was withdrawn, about seven hours in. Into that gap went the obvious inference: that a ten-day emergency lifted in seven hours had to be covering something. What the reporting established instead was a bureaucratic failure with a laser in it. This file keeps the two apart. The closure, the wording, the reversal and the cancelled flights are documented. The claim that it concealed an undisclosed catastrophe is not, and the sequence of official statements that made that claim plausible is itself the most interesting thing here.
Read the case file →The total solar eclipse of 12 August 2026, whose path of totality crosses eastern Greenland, western Iceland, and northern Spain, is a biblically foretold sign of the end times
On the afternoon and early evening of 12 August 2026, a total solar eclipse darkened a narrow band of the planet: the Moon's shadow touched down over far northeastern Siberia and the Arctic, raced across eastern Greenland and the west coast of Iceland, and reached northern Spain near sunset, with the barest clip of northwestern Portugal at the edge. For mainland Spain it was the first total solar eclipse since 1905, and the first over mainland Europe since 1999. In the run-up a familiar claim resurfaced: that the eclipse is not just a celestial event but a supernatural sign, a marker of the biblical end times. This file separates the two layers cleanly. The eclipse is a documented, precisely predicted astronomical event, and nothing about it is in question. The prophecy was a separate claim laid on top of that event, and the date has now come and gone: the eclipse happened exactly as predicted, was photographed from Iceland to Spain, and brought no end of anything. The claim is rated debunked. Eclipses are natural, recurring, and calculable centuries in advance, and no eclipse in recorded history has been shown to fulfill an end-times prophecy.
Read the case file →They really said it, so the quote is fair game: a statement confirmed as genuine and correctly attributed can be passed on as evidence of what its speaker thinks
The instinct to ask whether a quote is real is a good one, and it is now widespread enough that fact-checkers answer it constantly. What almost nobody asks is the second question. In 2026 Snopes rated a run of quote claims Correct Attribution, its verdict for statements that were genuinely made by the person credited, and in case after case the confirmation did not settle the matter. A Florida meteorologist's line about no longer being able to predict hurricanes was exactly as quoted, from 3 June 2025, and was circulating in August 2026 as though it described the season then underway. Sean Penn's description of a president as an enemy of mankind was his, written in a 2018 Time essay about relief work in Haiti after the 2010 earthquake, and spread eight years later as a fresh denunciation. A Heritage Foundation chairman's 2021 remarks were correctly attributed for most of their length, with someone else's commentary on them attached to the end. Martina Navratilova's reply was real, made on social media to a video rather than to the president in a room. This file rates the assumption that a verified quote is a settled one.
Read the case file →Treasury scrapped the register of who really owns American companies, and is deleting the records it already holds, in order to protect the people those records would have identified
For most of the last decade the standard answer to 'who actually owns this company?' was that nobody in the United States government knew, and that this was the single largest hole in global anti-money-laundering policy. The Corporate Transparency Act was written to close it. On 11 August 2026 Treasury announced that US companies and US persons will permanently no longer report ownership to the government, and that the filings already collected from US persons will be deleted. The rule is documented, the deletion is stated in Treasury's own press release, and serious transparency organisations object to it in strong terms. From there a theory has grown that the point of the exercise was to protect particular people from being identified. This file separates the two. The first part is on the record and can be checked in a government press release. The second is a claim about purpose, and no source cited here establishes one. Two facts sit awkwardly with the theory in its usual form: this has been happening in public since March 2025, and the ownership data itself does not disappear, it moves from a federal database into the private compliance systems of banks.
Read the case file →Videos circulating in India show Muslim offenders: a Muslim man snatching a phone in Gwalior, a Muslim woman throwing slippers at a statue of Shivaji Maharaj in Pune
Two videos went around India this week. In one, two sisters on a scooter in Gwalior chase down and catch a man who has snatched their phone. In the other, a woman throws slippers at a statue of Shivaji Maharaj in a Pune suburb and is detained. Both happened. Both were filmed. Both produced police cases. The captions added one thing each: that the man was Muslim, that the woman was Muslim. Factly checked both on 12 August and both were false. Gwalior police named the accused and the station house officer said he is not from the Muslim community; in Pune the senior inspector on the case said the woman arrested is not Muslim either. This is the cheapest fabrication in circulation, because it requires no editing at all, and the hardest to catch, because reverse image search confirms the video is genuine and stops there. The only thing that settles it is a named officer answering a phone. This file keeps two things apart: what happened, which is a matter for the police and is not judged here, and the religious identification, which was invented.
Read the case file →Videos circulating online prove Moroccan border guards deliberately opened the frontier at Ceuta in July 2026 to engineer a mass crossing into Spain
Starting on Thursday 30 July 2026, tens of thousands of people crossed from Morocco into Ceuta, the Spanish city on the north African coast, mostly by swimming around the breakwaters at Tarajal and Benzu. Spain's Interior Ministry put the figure at close to 50,000 in roughly a day; Ceuta's president said 60,000. Dozens died. It was, by any measure, a major event, and within hours videos were circulating captioned as proof that it had been deliberately opened from the Moroccan side. Two of the most shared were checked by the fact-checking outlet Lead Stories on 31 July and neither is what it claims. One, captioned as showing a Moroccan guard opening the border fence in July 2026, was posted online in 2021. The other, shared with the caption 'Is this an invasion of Spain?', had been online since at least 5 July under a caption that mentioned neither country, and two AI detection tools rated it likely machine-generated, with visible anatomical errors in the crowd. This file keeps the layers apart. The crossings, the deaths, and the emergency are documented and are not in question. The claim rated here is that these particular clips prove a staged operation, and that claim is debunked. The larger question of what Moroccan enforcement did or did not do in July 2026 is unresolved, and is treated as such below.
Read the case file →Viral AI-generated images showing Jeffrey Epstein alongside politicians and celebrities are real photographs leaked from the government's Epstein files
When the Justice Department released millions of pages of Epstein-related records in early 2026, the genuine disclosure was quickly polluted by a flood of fakes. AI image generators were used to manufacture realistic-looking 'photographs' of Jeffrey Epstein posed with prominent political and celebrity figures, which then circulated as if they were leaked evidence from the files. Open-source researchers and fact-checkers, Open Measures, Snopes, Bellingcat, and the European Broadcasting Union's forensic team among them, examined the most viral examples and identified them as synthetic, not as anything found in the government release. This case file rates the claim that these viral AI images are authentic leaked photos. It is false. It also covers the second-order damage: a real archive of documents becomes harder to discuss when the information space is saturated with convincing fabrications, and the mere existence of deepfakes hands the genuinely guilty a way to wave off authentic evidence.
Read the case file →Viral claims that a nationwide “Bharat Bandh” and chakka jam would shut India down on 15 July 2026 were a debunked hoax: no central or state government, farmer union, or transport association ever called such a strike, and none took place
In the first half of July 2026, messages ricocheted across Indian social media claiming that a nationwide Bharat Bandh, a general shutdown, and a chakka jam (road blockade) would bring the country to a halt on 15 July 2026. The posts said farmer organizations, youth groups, transport workers, and members of the public had jointly called the strike over rising fuel prices and the government's mandatory ethanol-blending policy for petrol. Indian fact-checkers, led by LatestLY's repeated fact-check reports, checked the claim against the record and found nothing behind it: no central or state government, no police authority, and no major national farmer union or transport body had called, confirmed, or backed any such shutdown. The viral material blended dramatic archival footage from real earlier strikes, notably the 12 February 2026 trade-union and farmer general strike, with fabricated notices carrying the new date. The date came and went without an organized national strike. This file treats the specific claim as what fact-checkers found it to be: a false, engagement-driven hoax.
Read the case file →Viral photos of a Zendaya and Tom Holland wedding at Lake Como are real, leaked images that document the couple's secret marriage
In March 2026, a run of strikingly realistic images showing Zendaya in a satin wedding gown and Tom Holland in a tuxedo, most of them set beside Italy's Lake Como, raced across social media and gathered more than ten million likes. Many people took them for leaked photographs of a secret wedding. They were AI-generated. Zendaya confirmed as much herself on Jimmy Kimmel Live, saying that many people had been fooled, that acquaintances had congratulated her on the beautiful pictures, and that she had to tell them the images were AI. Her stylist Law Roach, the person who actually dresses her, brushed the fabricated gown aside as not good enough. This case file separates two things the story kept fusing: what is on the record, that Zendaya and Tom Holland are a genuine, publicly known couple, reported to be engaged, and the claim it rates, that the viral pictures are real photographs of their wedding. The relationship is real. The photos are not. On that claim the verdict is debunked, and the episode stands as one of the cleanest media-literacy cases of the year: convincing synthetic images of a plausible event, believed by millions before anyone paused to check.
Read the case file →Viral videos show Muslims taking over British streets and transport, blocking commuters, shutting down London, and forcing halal rules on the country
Since spring 2026 a steady run of videos has circulated in Britain appearing to show Muslims occupying public space: praying in the middle of London streets, marching in their thousands to demand halal food standards, and kneeling on prayer mats down the aisle of a London Underground carriage while trapped commuters complain that they cannot get off. The footage looks convincing, the captions are furious, and the comment sections fill with people who believe they are watching the news. None of it happened. Full Fact has debunked at least four of these items between April and August 2026, and in each case the video was generated by artificial intelligence or the report was assembled from unrelated old photographs. The Tube clip was rated 99.9 percent likely AI by one detection tool; the halal march carried a Google SynthID watermark in both audio and visuals. This file rates the genre, not a single clip, and the rating is that it is fabricated. It is worth being plain about what these videos are for: they invent misbehaviour by a real minority in order to make people angry at their neighbours. The most useful thing about them is how they fail, which is documented below.
Read the case file →The total solar eclipse of August 2, 2027 is a supernatural omen because its path crosses Mecca, Luxor and the Middle East
A real astronomical event has picked up an unreal story. The total solar eclipse of August 2, 2027 will be one of the great eclipses of the century, with up to about 6 minutes 23 seconds of totality and a path crossing North Africa and the Middle East, over Luxor and over Mecca. Because of that path, some prophecy content frames it as a supernatural sign: an end-times omen, a herald of 'three days of darkness,' or, in an openly anti-Muslim strand, a portent of the 'rise of Islam' or the coming of the Dajjal. None of it has any basis. Eclipses are fully predictable geometry, common on human timescales, and carry no message. This case file keeps the established record (a real, spectacular eclipse) separate from the claim it rates (that it is an omen), which is debunked.
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