Post mixes up stats from two elections to claim voter fraud
Elon Musk, a former senior adviser to President Donald Trump, reposted a Feb. 8 post that read, “BREAKING: Elon Musk calls for mail-in voting to be abolished nationwide except for troops overseas or a serious medical condition.”
A repost of Musk’s repost added, “During the 2020 election, Pennsylvania sent out 1,823,148 mail-in ballots but received back around 2.5 MILLION mail-in ballots.”
Trump also reposted that post on his Truth Social platform.
But regardless of how many times it’s posted and reposted, the claim is false, according to FactCheck.org. The data uses numbers from two different elections.
“This claim is based on mixing up statistics from the primary and the general election,” Charles Stewart III, director of the MIT Election Data and Science Lab, told FactCheck.
In the 2020 general election in Pennsylvania, 2,673,272 mail-in ballot applications were approved, or sent out, according to the state’s voting records. Of those, 2,273,490 votes were cast. Also, 435,932 absentee ballots were sent out while 374,659 of them were cast.
For the 2020 primary election, nearly 1.8 million absentee and mail-in ballots were sent out, while nearly 1.5 million votes were cast.
A combination of those statistics was cited in the post.
“These are long-ago debunked claims that will not disappear despite the availability of official data,” Stewart said.
Noem quote about Jesus is satire
A recent post claimed Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem brought up some interesting information while criticizing the Super Bowl halftime show, in which singer Bad Bunny performed mostly using Spanish.
“Kristi Noem reportedly claimed: ‘If Jesus wanted America to speak Spanish, he wouldn’t have written the Bible in English,’” the Feb. 10 X post partially read, adding. “Let’s pause — because history exists. Jesus Christ lived in the 1st century. The Gospels were written in Greek, with Jesus himself speaking Aramaic. … So no — Jesus didn’t write the Bible.”
The post asks, “Did a U.S. Cabinet secretary really say this?”
No, she didn’t, according to Snopes. The post, which was also shared on Threads and Reddit, originated on Facebook as satire.
There are plenty of reasons to show that this wasn’t true.
That post included a logo, designed to look like the Fox News logo, however it read “FOX MEWS.” It also included the disclaimer “@Mrs. Putin Satire” posted in various spots over the photo.
And in the meme from the post, the quote is repeated, although the credit includes obvious typographical changes to Noem’s name and title.
Photo of Epstein, others is fake
A post earlier this month included a photo of convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein hanging out by a pool along with a collection of famous people.
“A big happy pedo family. These people make me sick,” reads the text above a photo which shows Epstein, along with former rapper Sean “Diddy” Combs, billionaire investor Bill Gates, rapper Jay-Z, former U.S. secretary of state Hillary Rodham Clinton, former President Bill Clinton and late astrophysicist Stephen Hawking.
The group is standing along the deck of a pool, except for Hawking who is in a wheelchair, each smiling with their arms around each other.
Some but not all of those prominent figures have been linked to the Epstein files, but this photo isn’t real, according to Reuters.
Google’s SynthID tool has identified the photo as artificial intelligence, or AI. SynthID is a tool that detects watermarks contained in images created using Google’s AI models.
A spokesperson for Gates' private office, Gates Ventures, told Reuters that the image is fake.
Ellen DeGeneres not connected to Epstein
A Feb. 14 X post contained some disturbing information about former TV talk show host Ellen DeGeneres.
“The Epstein files expose Ellen DeGeneres as Hollywood's ‘most prolific cannibal.’ She ate children's flesh,” the post read. In just two days, it had racked up 12.5 million views.
But this ridiculous claim is false, according to PolitiFact. No reports of people connected to Epstein have included DeGeneres.
The claim originated on the website The People’s Voice, which frequently posts false information, PolitiFact said. The site included an article about DeGeneres and a video which contained a recording from a supposed whistleblower.
Northwestern University computer science professor V.S. Subrahmanian and postdoctoral researcher Marco Postiglione analyzed the audio clip and determined it was most likely created using AI. They said it lacked “emotional breaks typical of genuine testimony.”
Likewise, University of Michigan-Dearborn professor Hafiz Malik, who also analyzed the clip, said the speaker’s voice sounded flat.
“If you’re talking to somebody, noise does change, so you don’t see a fixed kind of pattern in noise in general,” Malik told PolitiFact.
• Bob Oswald is a veteran Chicago-area journalist and former news editor of the Elgin Courier-News. Contact him at boboswald33@gmail.com.