Is the new Russian website "War on Fakes" a real and reliable fact checking website run by "experts and journalists"? We have questions. The site appeared to spring up almost overnight in early March 2022 in the wake of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, and started publishing articles in several languages meant to look like fact checks, often accompanied with…

Colorado Springs - In response to the escalating events and the outbreak of a war between Russia and Ukraine at the end of February 2022 Lead Stories today announces the launch of Russian and Ukrainian versions of its award-winning fact checking website leadstories.com The new sites are located at russian.leadstories.com and ukrainian.leadstories.com and are staffed by veteran journalists fluent in…

On November 10, 2021, Lead Stories published a fact check about an article published by the British Medical Journal (BMJ) on November 2, 2021. In response, the BMJ published an open letter to Mark Zuckerberg on December 17, 2021, calling our fact check "inaccurate, incompetent and irresponsible." We addressed their concerns in a December 18, 2021, article, going over their…

Ms. Susan Wojcicki, It's been almost two years since the COVID-19 pandemic started. The world has seen time and time again how destructive disinformation and misinformation can be for social harmony, democracy, and public health; too many lives and livelihoods have been ruined, and far too many people have lost loved ones to disinformation. As an international network of fact-checking…

The British Medical Journal published an open letter on December 17, 2021 (archived here) taking issue with a Lead Stories fact check. Our response is below (UPDATE: also see "Context Matters: Why Lead Stories Fact Checked The BMJ"): It is ironic to read that BMJ.com objects to the headline on Lead Stories' fact check of a BMJ.com article when the…

Wanted for Defamation On November 5, 2021, a website named Conservative Beaver published a false story about the CEO of Pfizer being arrested for fraud. It wasn't the first false story published by the website and it wouldn't be the last: Only a few days later the site falsely claimed Myriam Bourla (the wife of Pfizer's CEO Albert Bourla) died…

Did the materials released by Mike Lindell at his Cyber Symposium meet evidentiary standards of relevance, proof of origin, chain-of-secure-custody and reproducibility that online security experts say would be needed to take seriously his claim that he holds massive data files showing the 2020 election was stolen by hackers? No, that's not true. Lead Stories asked for the information necessary…

After Mike Lindell's appearance on the April 28, 2021, "Jimmy Kimmel Live!" show, Lead Stories published a story titled "Attention Mike Lindell: What You May Want To Know About The 'Data' Used In Your Stolen Election Claims" that traced some of the data used in Lindell's movies to a man named Dennis L. Montgomery. Lindell has been quite vague on…

Will the materials Mike Lindell releases at his Cyber Symposium meet evidentiary standards of authenticity to support his claim the 2020 election was stolen? Here's how Lead Stories will test the data: By asking the questions we sent to him August 3, 2021. Lead Stories will tune into the symposium to ask the questions we have been asking since he…

MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell has produced four video documentaries so far, all claiming to show evidence of fraud in the November 2020 election. Lead Stories has previously looked into these videos here, here, here and here and found there were serious issues with the data and evidence that was presented in them. Lindell even admitted to us that some of…

The Lead Stories staff was just awarded a 2020 Sigma Delta Chi Award by The Society of Professional Journalists for our Covid-19 fact checking. We are very happy and honored to have been chosen and will strive to continue our fact checking on Covid-19 related stories. As we went into 2020 we fully expected we would be spending most of…

Summary: Mike Lindell's video series allegedly proving fraud in the November 2020 elections relies heavily on digital evidence in the form of files and animations that Lindell claims show attacks on the U.S. election infrastructure coming from China and other places. Lindell has never acknowledged where these files and animations came from. Lead Stories traced them back to a website…

At Lead Stories we are always open to trying out new technologies and methods when it comes to fact checking. The only way to truly know if something works or not is to try it out. Which is why we are happy to announce we have chosen to participate in a new initiative that seeks to explore if trading representations…

After we let our hair down a little yesterday for April Fools Day, today we are celebrating Fact Checking Day (like we do every year). Best wishes to all our fellow fact checkers around the world. We are also taking this opportunity to announce our participation in a new experimental way of funding fact checking through the sale of NFT…

UPDATE: Yes, this was an April Fools Day joke... Check the publication date. The "test" is just some progress bars moving and a message being displayed at the end. Of course a random website doesn't get to access to your browser history or social media data just because you clicked a button. After years of experimenting Lead Stories has developed…

If someone becomes sick or dies after getting a COVID-19 vaccine, is the shot necessarily to blame? No, that's not true: It is statistically inevitable that some people will get sick and die after getting the shot, for reasons that are unrelated to their body's response to the vaccine. People die every day of everything from heart attacks to cancer.…

Several people reported to us that Facebook erroneously added a "Missing Context" warning notice to posts wishing people a "Merry Christmas". The notice included a link to our fact check about certain items that were supposedly in the "Stimulus Bill". We did not flag any of these posts as part of our work in Facebook's Third Party Fact Checking Partnership.…

Abbie Richards, a climate science student in the Netherlands, was looking with bewilderment at the state of her home country of the United States. So many conspiracy theories echoing, particularly ahead of the election. Struggling to wrangle all of them for a paper, she made a chart naming some 100 conspiracies dominating the social media world to, she hoped, make…

Time for a change Perceptive readers (do we have any other ones?) probably noticed the little red flashes above our fact checking articles have changed this morning. They now read "Fact Check" instead of "Hoax Alert". This change was long overdue but we finally found the time to make it. For the longest time "Hoax Alert" has been the name…

The project, FactChat, will lead to the creation of a WhatsApp chatbot and two Spanish-language fact-checking units. ST. PETERSBURG, Fla. (Sept. 18, 2020) -- Led by the International Fact-Checking Network (IFCN) at the Poynter Institute, FactChat is the first collaborative project to unite 10 U.S. fact-checking organizations with two major Spanish-language news broadcasters to fight mis/disinformation during a presidential campaign.…