| |  | | Democracy Dies in Darkness | | | | | | | | | | The truth behind the rhetoric | | | | | | Trump vs. Biden President Trump ratcheted up his attacks on former vice president Joe Biden this week, alleging shady dealings with Ukraine and blasting "Scranton Joe" for supposedly having "deserted" his native Pennsylvania, a prized swing state with 20 electoral votes that each man has won before. "He left you, folks. He left you for another state," Trump said at a campaign rally in Montoursville, Pa. But in reality, Biden was a fourth-grader in 1953, when his family moved to Delaware so his father could make ends meet. In a Fox News interview the day before, Trump dropped more serious accusations, echoing lines of reporting in conservative media and the New York Times. As one of the stories goes, Biden as vice president browbeat the government of Ukraine into ousting the country's top prosecutor — a man named Viktor Shokin, who, according to Trump, "was after" Biden's son, Hunter Biden. Although Hunter Biden sat on the board of a natural gas company in the prosecutor's sights, no evidence shows the younger Biden was being investigated. Ukrainian authorities say they have no evidence of wrongdoing for either Biden. As the other story goes, Hunter Biden struck up business with China around the same time he flew on Air Force Two with his father to that country. (That's all there is to that accusation.) We rounded up four of Trump's attacks, each of them a Three Pinocchio special. As for fact checks of Biden, here are three we've published this month. |  | | Enjoy this newsletter? Forward it to someone else who'd like it! If this e-mail was forwarded to you, sign up here, for the weekly newsletter. Hear something fact-checkable? Send it here, we'll check it out. Faulty data on maternal mortality rates travels halfway around the world Rep. Don Beyer (D-Va.) claimed at a House hearing: "Anti-abortion bills increase maternal mortality and infant mortality. Texas is the best case. The reported rate of maternal deaths in Texas doubled when the state closed their abortion clinics and cut funding for Planned Parenthood." That's a compelling case. Planned Parenthood and abortion-rights supporters could hardly have a better talking point in their playbook. But it's wrong, as Beyer immediately conceded when contacted by The Fact Checker. Fortunately, Beyer at the hearing happened to make his point in front of an expert witness who had debunked the Texas data. He was quickly (and politely) corrected on the spot. A task force that reviewed the original Texas study, from 2016, found a series of errors in the underlying records that were used. Of 147 women listed as having died of pregnancy-related complications, the task force found many had been erroneously counted. Only 56 of the deaths fell under the definition of maternal mortality. That alters the picture quite dramatically, and a new study was published with the updated findings last year in the same journal, Obstetrics & Gynecology. We withheld Pinocchios for Beyer but decided to fact check him anyway, considering others may not be aware of the updated study. For example, the American Medical Association submitted prepared testimony for this same hearing ... with the same flawed, outdated Texas numbers. | |  | | Dystopia watch We like to keep our readers apprised of new developments in the world of digital fakery and misinformation. This week we have three different dispatches, all of them queasy-making and foreboding. Our Washington Post colleague Drew Harwell reports that distorted videos of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, "altered to make her sound as if she's drunkenly slurring her words, are spreading rapidly across social media." Doctored videos like this, subtly slowing down the action and tweaking the audio, are not as sophisticated as AI-powered "deepfakes," but even simple manipulations can get millions of views online. As for deepfakes, VICE reports that "researchers at the Samsung AI Center in Moscow developed a way to create 'living portraits' from a very small dataset — as few as one photograph, in some of their models." Whatever could go wrong? "Because they only need one source image, the researchers were able to animate paintings and famous portraits, with eerie results," VICE's Samantha Cole reported. "Fyodor Dostoevsky — who died well before motion picture cameras became commercially available — moves and talks in black and white. The Mona Lisa silently moves her mouth and eyes, a slight smile on her face. Salvador Dali rants on, mustache twitching." Just terrific. No potential for abuse here. | | Now for the pièce de résistance: NBC News reports that some moms are "infiltrating" private Facebook groups for parents of children with autism. Infiltrating? Yep. These Facebook groups are a hotbed for unfounded theories about autism and are also where some parents share dangerous remedies online. (Autism has no known cure.) The spy-moms gain access and screenshot the unsettling material they find inside. "Some parents credit turpentine or their children's own urine as the secret miracle drug for reversing autism," NBC's Brandy Zadrozny reported. "One of the most sought-after chemicals is chlorine dioxide — a compound that the Food and Drug Administration warns amounts to industrial bleach, and doctors say can cause permanent harm. Parents still give it to their children orally, through enemas, and in baths. Proponents of chlorine dioxide profit off these parents' fears and hopes by selling books about the supposed 'cure,' marketing the chemicals and posting how-to videos." We're always looking for fact-check suggestions. You can also reach us via email, Twitter (@GlennKesslerWP, @mmkelly22, @rizzoTK or use #FactCheckThis), or Facebook (Fact Checker). Read about our rating scale here, and sign up here for our weekly Fact Checker newsletter. Scroll down for this week's Pinocchio roundup. — Salvador Rizzo | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | |
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