Buttigieg and Gabbard trip up at the debate
Regular readers are likely familiar by now with the Democratic debate talking points we keep dinging in our fact checks. There's Sen. Bernie Sanders's claim about "500,000 people sleeping out on the street" (it's based on a single-night survey that also found nearly 360,000 of those people were in emergency shelters or transitional housing programs), or Sen. Cory Booker's claim that "more African Americans [are] under criminal supervision in America than all the slaves since 1850." (The 1850 Census counted 3.6 million slaves, but African Americans constituted 2.3 million, or 34 percent, of the total 6.8 million correctional population in 2014.) So we'll draw your attention today toward some of the new fishy claims we spotted at the fifth Democratic debate, hosted this week by The Washington Post and MSNBC. Mayor Pete Buttigieg of South Bend, Ind., said, "The president had to confess in writing, in court, to illegally diverting charitable contributions that were supposed to go to veterans." The New York state attorney general sued President Trump in 2018, alleging a series of violations at the Donald J. Trump Foundation, namely that the president mixed up a fundraiser for veterans in Iowa with his 2016 campaign. The president settled the lawsuit this year. A New York state judge on Nov. 7 noted in a court order that "the Funds did ultimately reach their intended destinations, i.e., charitable organizations supporting veterans." Rep. Tulsi Gabbard of Hawaii claimed that Buttigieg said he "would be willing to send our troops to Mexico to fight the cartels." But those remarks from the mayor are taken out of context. Buttigieg significantly hedged his comments about sending troops to Mexico when he was asked about the issue in a Los Angeles forum. He said he would consider sending troops only as part of a "security partnership," or when treaty obligations required it. For the full fact check, click here. Enjoy this newsletter? Forward it to someone else who'd like it! If this e-mail was forwarded to you, sign up here. Hear something fact-checkable? Send it here, we'll check it out. From Russia, with <3
Special counsel Robert Mueller put it all in print earlier this year: Russia used email leaks, propaganda and social media to stoke societal divisions and undermine the integrity of the 2016 U.S. election. But this story arguably starts in 2013, when Google and Facebook acquired smaller companies, including advertising exchanges and other platforms such as YouTube and Instagram, that expanded their reach. Facebook launched Custom Audiences and Lookalike Audiences, which paired advertisers' preferences with Facebook's own algorithm. Essentially, this opened the door to advertisers targeting specific individuals on the most popular Internet platforms. Such tools are incredibly useful to marketers, whether they're promoting a new movie or trying to influence an election. By 2016, Russia had started more than 20 campaigns in 13 countries. Forty percent of these campaigns were on Facebook and nearly 90 percent were on Twitter, according to a report from Princeton University's Empirical Studies of Conflict Project. These campaigns appeared across platforms, creating an image of legitimacy and compelling followers to share personal information, install software extensions and show up to rallies. And no one — not the government, not the social media companies — seems to have noticed. And the Russians are no longer alone. Iran and China have tried similar operations, for example. Facebook, Google and Twitter have taken steps to combat disinformation and provide more transparency for political advertising on their platforms. But there is no new legislation to govern political digital advertising, and there is no question that digital advertising will be a force in the 2020 election. (Since May 2018, Google and Facebook have sold nearly $1 billion worth of digital ads.) The question is whether a new disinformation campaign, Russian or otherwise, will seek to exploit new vulnerabilities across government, journalism and social media in the 2020 election that have not been identified yet or have not yet been addressed. We take a comprehensive look at this digital landscape in a video fact check. For the full fact check, click here. To see the video fact check on YouTube, click here. We're always looking for fact-check suggestions. You can also reach us via email, Twitter (@GlennKesslerWP, @mmkelly22, @rizzoTK, @SarahCahlan or use #FactCheckThis), or Facebook (Fact Checker). Read about our rating scale here, and sign up for the newsletter here. Scroll down for this week's Pinocchio roundup. | | | By Glenn Kessler, Salvador Rizzo and Meg Kelly ● Read more » | | | | | | | 
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