Your weekly fact-checks
#AI Governance for Media: Free Virtual Event January 30th
On January 30, Factiverse's Smart Trust Virtual Summit brings together media leaders who've successfully implemented AI governance frameworks to share their practical risk management, vendor evaluation, and ROI measurement strategies.
This free virtual event (limited to 150 seats) offers actionable frameworks rather than theory—register at https://www.factiverse.ai/smart-trust-summit
#Elections2025
This week's election: 2025 Central African general election
Human Rights Watch
Election Date: 28/12/2025
The Central African Republic will hold presidential elections on December 28, 2025, with incumbent Faustin-Archange Touadéra seeking a third term, having removed term limits through a controversial 2023 referendum. The election has been marred by opposition repression, candidate restrictions, and concerns from Human Rights Watch about its fairness and conduct.
#TrumpCheck
FactCheck.org
False: Trump says that inflation when he took office was the “worst … in the history of our country” and that inflation had now “stopped.”
Inflation was never the “worst” under Biden, and it was 3% for the 12 months ending in January. It rose 2.7% in the 12-month period ending in November.
FactCheck.org
False: Trump says that "for the first time in years, wages are rising much faster than inflation.”
Year-over-year wages have been rising faster than inflation since June 2023, according to Bureau of Labor Statistics figures.
FactCheck.org
False: Trump claimed that due to the tax cuts in the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, “many families will be saving between $11,000 and $20,000 a year.”
The Tax Policy Center estimated the average tax cut would be $800. Only those in the top 1% of households would see an average tax decrease of the amount Trump claimed.
#Politics
Lead Stories
False: Ukrainian President Zelenskyy has an Israeli passport.
The image got the spelling of his last name wrong. The machine-readable text on the bottom of the first page didn't fit the internationally standardised form, either.
Factly
False: PM Narendra Modi watched a video of Bihar CM Nitish Kumar seeking forgiveness from Indian Muslims and Muslim women.
This is an AI-generated deepfake video, not a real video of Nitish Kumar apologising to Indian Muslims. AI content detection tools have identified it as an AI-generated video.
#Technology
Africa Check
False: Kenya's JKUAT says portal hacked to wipe students' fee balances.
Kenya’s Jomo Kenyatta University of Agriculture and Technology said the brief display of zero balances resulted from a routine system upgrade, not a security breach as claimed online.
#Healthcare
Agence France-Presse - AFP
False: RNA rabies vaccines are risky for pets.
Surveys show vaccine hesitancy among pet owners in the United States is rising, leaving both animals and people at greater risk for zoonotic diseases. On social media, influencers are warning against a vaccine that uses RNA particle technology to protect against rabies, but veterinarians in the United States and Canada say the shot was thoroughly tested and designed to trigger fewer adverse reactions.
#Conflicts
Lead Stories
False: ICE marched deportees onto a troop carrier in Minnesota.
AI made that clip. Early versions of it showed a watermark pointing to a specific generative AI tool and it's unlikely a military transport plane would have a tail number like the one in the video.
Agence France-Presse - AFP
False: The Bondi Beach shooter is an Israeli man called David Cohen.
After gunmen opened fire at an event on Sydney's famous Bondi Beach to celebrate a Jewish festival, social media users falsely claimed the attack was carried out by "one of their own". They alleged one of the shooters was an Israeli man named "David Cohen", but accompanying images purportedly taken from his Facebook profile bore errors indicative of AI. Australian media have identified the alleged perpetrators in the country's worst mass shooting in decades as Sajid Akram and his son Naveed.
PolitiFact
False: Brown University student Mustapha Karbouch was a suspect in school shooting.
Police identified Claudio Manuel Neves Valente as the gunman in the Dec. 13 Brown University shooting.In the days leading up to Neves Valente being located, social media users baselessly named a current Brown student, Mustapha Kharbouch, as the suspect.Kharbouch received death threats and called the experience "an unimaginable nightmare," his attorneys said.
#Nordics
Tjekdet
Sandt: Russiske hackere overvågede gæster på en dansk pub.
Russiske hackere med tilknytning til Kreml har fået adgang til overvågningskameraer i hele Europa, herunder et på en dansk pub i Helsingør, og har offentliggjort optagelser online som led i en bredere desinformationskampagne, der har til formål at destabilisere de europæiske samfund. Cybersikkerhedseksperter siger, at hackerne demonstrerer deres rækkevidde og overvågningskapacitet, selvom angrebene er rettet mod forbrugerkameraer, der er lette at hacke, snarere end kritisk infrastruktur.
#WTF?! What The Fact of the week
Snopes
True: Raccoons are showing signs of domestication.
Researchers compared thousands of images of raccoons from iNaturalist, a website where users post images of flora and fauna, based on location. They found that raccoons photographed in urban areas in North America showed a reduction in snout length compared with those in rural areas. Reduced snout length is typical of what scientists call "domestication syndrome," a set of traits shared by domesticated animals.
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