As wildfires continued to rage in Southern California, President-elect Donald Trump took to social media with several false and misleading claims casting blame on California’s Democratic governor, Gavin Newsom, and President Joe Biden.
Meta is ending its partnership with U.S. fact-checking organizations, such as ours, but we’d like to reassure our readers: FactCheck.org isn’t going anywhere. Our journalists will continue to provide nonpartisan coverage of false and misleading political claims, helping you to sort fact from fiction, just as we have done for more than 20 years.
Federal law enforcement officials have identified an Army veteran, who was born in the United States, as the sole person responsible for the Jan. 1 terrorist attack in New Orleans that killed 14 people and injured many more. But some Republican politicians and social media posts have wrongly claimed or suggested that the attack was the result of illegal immigration.
We wrote about a lot of misinformation in 2024, and, as usual, some fact-checking articles piqued our readers’ interest more than others. In this post, we present the 10 most popular stories published on our website this past year.
During my time at FactCheck.org, I’ve saved more than a few handwritten notes from grateful readers. I’ve taped some of them to the bookcase above my desk. These are my daily reminders of what an honor and privilege it is to work at FactCheck.org.
In addition to extending the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, one of his signature achievements in his first term, President-elect Donald Trump has proposed a long list of tax cuts, from eliminating taxes on Social Security benefits to lowering the corporate tax rate. We’ll look at Trump’s tax proposals, their cost and what impact they could have on taxpayers.
Q: Who is flying the drones that are appearing over the East Coast?
A: On Dec. 17, four federal agencies said they followed up more than 5,000 reported drone sightings and determined that they were lawful private and law enforcement drones and other aircraft “mistakenly reported as drones.” The agencies said the drones do not pose a security threat.
We reviewed what each of President-elect Donald Trump’s presumptive nominees to lead the Environmental Protection Agency, the Department of the Interior and the Department of Energy have said about climate change and the environment.
Elon Musk, who has been tapped by President-elect Donald Trump to lead a committee to ferret out government waste, wrongly posted to X that members of Congress are trying to vote themselves a 40% raise. The maximum possible raise in 2025 would be 3.8%, not 40%.
Our annual roundup of the worst falsehoods of the year.