Now you see it, now you don't The Fact Checker video team goes through heaps of visual misinformation every day, whether it's manipulated video, suspect content from politicians or social media posts ostensibly capturing global events. Some of these fishy videos are quickly forgotten with not much harm done, while others spread like wildfire. Our new mini-series — "Fakeout" — delves into cases around the globe in which online misinformation led to real-life, and often troubling, consequences. The first episode explores the situation in the central African country of Gabon (population: 2 million), where a missing president and a suspicious-looking video helped spark an attempted coup. President Ali Bongo Ondimba fell ill in October 2018. He wasn't seen in public for months and the government released little information about his health. Rumors and conspiracy theories swirled: Was the president dead? Had he been replaced with a body double? Three months after his disappearance from public life, a video of Bongo addressing the nation on New Year's was released. For some, this was proof of life. Others called the video a "deepfake" manipulation made possible by artificial intelligence. A week later, soldiers stormed the national radio station. Our investigation determined that the New Year's video in all likelihood was not a deepfake manipulation. The second episode, out today, focuses on southern India, where misinformation on WhatsApp led to a mob killing. Five men traveled to Handikera, a village in the southern state of Karnataka, on July 13, 2018. The summer vacation they had planned quickly turned violent. Rumors about child kidnappings had spread rapidly across India for months via WhatsApp, the messaging app owned by Facebook. Videos falsely accusing the men of being child kidnappers were circulated, villagers violently beat them and ultimately killed Mohammed Azam, a 32-year-old software engineer. Our investigation set the record straight and analyzed how destabilizing rumors can spread quickly on messaging apps. For the full fact checks, click here for Gabon and here for India. More episodes are on the way. Enjoy this newsletter? Forward it to someone else who'd like it! If this email was forwarded to you, sign up here. Did you hear something fact-checkable? Send it here; we'll check it out. Battle royal in the Silver State Las Vegas puts on a good show — even on a presidential debate stage. The Democratic contenders turned up the heat at their ninth presidential debate, with multiple skirmishes and free-for-alls and a baptism by fire for the new addition to the stage: billionaire former New York mayor Michael Bloomberg. We analyzed seven claims that set off our fact-checking antennae. "We adopted a policy which had been in place. The policy that all big police departments use of stop-and-frisk. What happened, however, was it got out of control," Bloomberg said. "And when we discovered, I discovered, that we were doing many, many, too many stop-and-frisks, we cut 95 percent of it out." It's a misleading retelling of events, relying on cherry-picked data. During Bloomberg's tenure, stop-and-frisk incidents increased nearly 600 percent over the first 10 years, reaching a high point of about 686,000 actions in 2011. At the debate, he took the high point from the first quarter of 2012 and compared it with the low point from the last quarter of 2013 to arrive at a 95 percent drop; but that's deceptive because it obscures the huge spike from 2011. Bloomberg said he later discovered that the stop-and-frisk policy, which disproportionately targeted black and Hispanic men, had gotten out of control and ramped it down. That claim erases key context. For starters, Bloomberg continued to defend the policy until recently, disowning it only before he joined the presidential race. And, his administration was buffeted by lawsuits challenging the practice. A federal judge ruled in 2013 that the way New York police officers were conducting the stops was unconstitutional. It was in the face of that legal blowback that Bloomberg's administration reduced stops-and-frisks. In rebuking Bloomberg, former vice president Joe Biden made misleading comments of his own, stretching the role of President Barack Obama's Justice Department in the stop-and-frisk legal proceedings. "Let's get something straight," Biden said. "The reason the stop-and-frisk changed is because Barack Obama sent moderators to see what was going on when we sent him there to say, 'This practice has to stop.'" The Justice Department merely filed a "statement of interest" in the case recommending the appointment of a federal monitor if the Bloomberg administration lost in court, but the Justice Department declined to take a position on whether stop-and-frisk practices in New York violated the Constitution. For the full fact check, click here. Pardon the interruptionSome readers have wondered why the newsletter has not appeared regularly the last few weeks. We've been working on a special project and so have not been writing regular fact checks, just roundups of the debates. We should be back on our regular schedule in March. Thank you for being devoted readers. We're always looking for fact-check suggestions. You can reach us via email, Twitter (@GlennKesslerWP, @rizzoTK, @mmkelly22, @SarahCahlan) or Facebook. Read about our process and rating scale here, and sign up for the newsletter here. Scroll down for this week's Pinocchio roundup. | By Glenn Kessler, Salvador Rizzo and Sarah Cahlan ● Read more » | | | | 
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