Bloomingdale’s Ads Fund Fake Claims About D.C. Air Disaster
PLUS: Imaginary U.S. Funding for Condoms in Gaza; Lyme Disease Falsely Labeled as Bioweapon
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Today:
Ads for Bloomingdale’s and Temu fund false claim that Army helicopter pilot in fatal crash was transgender
Conservative commentators amplify false claim that the U.S. earmarked $50 million for condoms in Gaza
RFK Jr. testimony notwithstanding, Lyme disease is not a bioweapon
A fake Trump post on Truth Social about Selena Gomez dupes conservatives
And More …
Today’s newsletter was edited by Eric Effron and Sofia Rubinson
1. Brand Victims of the Week: Ads for Bloomingdale’s and Temu Fund False Claim Army Helicopter Pilot Was Transgender
In this Reality Check feature, NewsGuard identifies global brands that support the spread of misinformation by unintentionally funneling programmatic advertising dollars to sites that repeatedly peddle false claims. Unless advertisers use inclusion or exclusion lists to place their programmatic ads, these ads will appear on websites regardless of their trustworthiness.
What happened: Programmatic ads for Bloomingdale’s and Chinese online marketplace Temu were spotted by a NewsGuard analyst on an article published by SMObserved.com (NewsGuard Trust Score: 5/100) that advanced a false claim about the fatal D.C. plane crash.
A closer look: The Jan. 30 article was titled “A Transgender Pilot Named Jo Ellis Flew Blackhawk Helicopter Into the American Airlines Jet at Reagan National” and had the subheadline, “Jo Ellis served in the Virginia National Guard for 15 years and transitioned while serving as a pilot. She hated Trump. Accident was a Murder Suicide.” Both headlines appeared beside the advertisements.
Actually: Ellis was not involved in the accident. She posted a video on Facebook as “proof of life” on Jan. 31, 2025.
The Observer’s article was later corrected, but still contains a photo caption that states that Ellis crashed the jet.
NewsGuard has found that SMObserved.com (Santa Monica Observer) previously advanced false claims about U.S. politics, including the falsehood that the man who attacked Nancy Pelosi’s husband Paul Pelosi was a male prostitute.
Representatives for Bloomingdale’s and Temu did not immediately respond to NewsGuard’s emailed requests for comment.
(Disclosure: NewsGuard is among the companies that license data that would help advertisers only advertise on reliable, brand suitable news sites.)
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2. Bogus Claim that U.S. Pays for Condoms in Gaza Went from White House Podium to the Conservative Mediasphere
By Macrina Wang
What happened: After White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said at a Jan. 28 press briefing that the Biden administration had earmarked $50 million for condoms to Gaza, the allegation took off in conservative circles.
However, the claim appears to be baseless.
A closer look: Conservative websites, commentators, and social media users repeated Leavitt’s claim, some of them noting that Palestinians have previously flown inflated condoms like balloons into Israel carrying explosive devices, according to Israeli news reports.
Fox News host Jesse Watters said on the Jan. 28 episode of “Jesse Watters Primetime” (TV Trust Score: 0/10): “We were about to spend $50 million on condoms in Gaza. … They make condom bombs. Hamas inflates the condoms, straps on an explosive, and floats them into Israel. It’s a dual-use technology.”
Conservative X account @libsoftiktok, which NewsGuard has found to frequently spread misinformation, said in a Jan. 28 post: “You may be wondering why Gaza would need $50 million worth of condoms. It’s because they use condoms as weapons to fly explosives into Israel. Biden was going to fund terrorism. The Trump admin stopped it.” The post received 1.8 million views and 50,000 likes in two days.
Right-wing site PJMedia.com (Trust Score: 27.5/100) advanced the claim in an article that said: “As it was on its way out, the Biden regime looked around at the devastation in North Carolina and Los Angeles, at the American people’s suffering from inflation, at ever-rising gas prices, and at the increasing difficulty ordinary people have in simply making ends meet, and decided: Hey what we really need to do is send $50 million worth of condoms to Gaza.”
Actually: As noted above, there is no evidence to back this claim.
Trump State Department officials told reporters that the $50 million sum was in reference to two $50 million aid packages for Gaza provided by the International Medical Corp (IMC), a Los Angeles-based nonprofit that provides global humanitarian assistance.
However, a NewsGuard review of IMC’s government contracts found no evidence of $50 million going to Gazan condoms. The IMC denied the claim in a Jan. 29 statement.
The IMC reported receiving $68 million from the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) to support operations in Gaza since October 2023, when the Israel-Gaza war broke out, but said that the money was used in Gaza to operate hospitals and a blood bank, provide access to clean water, and treat malnutrition, not to “procure or distribute condoms.”
A top USAID official during the Biden administration, Jeremy Konyndyk, said in a Jan. 29 X thread: “USAID procures condoms for around $0.05 apiece. … $50m would be ONE BILLION condoms.” (Gaza has a population of 2.1 million, according to a December 2024 report by the Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics.)
An unnamed former senior Biden official who worked on Gaza aid also denied the claim to CNN (Trust Score: 80/100), saying the alleged $50 million for condoms was “imaginary.”
Reality Check members can read NewsGuard’s Misinformation Fingerprint for this claim here.
Click here to find out more about NewsGuard Trust Scores and our process for rating websites. You can download NewsGuard’s browser extension, which displays NewsGuard Trust Score icons next to links on search engines, social media feeds, and other platforms by clicking here.
3. RFK Jr.’s Testimony Revives Claim that Lyme Disease Was Created as a Bioweapon
What happened: Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s confirmation hearing for Secretary of Health and Human Services resurfaced the debunked claim that Lyme disease is a bioweapon engineered in a U.S. government lab.
A closer look: On Jan. 29, Democratic Sen. Michael Bennet asked Kennedy, “Did you say that Lyme disease is a highly likely militarily engineered bioweapon?” Kennedy responded, “I probably did say that.”
Kennedy first advanced the claim in a Jan. 22, 2024, episode of the “RFK Jr Podcast” (Podcast Trust Score: 1/10).
While this false claim has been circulating online since at least March 2023, it experienced a resurgence following the confirmation hearing.
“RFK Jr. is correct about Lyme disease being created as a bioweapon in a lab on Plum Island, just off Connecticut’s coast,” X user @ShadowofEzra stated in a Jan. 29 post, which garnered more than 226,600 views within five hours.
Citing an AI response from a chatbot, conservative X user @ChuckCallesto said, “According to Uncensored AI, RFK Jr. Is in fact.. correct.” The post received 48,000 views and 1,500 likes in two days.
Actually: There is no evidence that Lyme disease was engineered as a bioweapon in a U.S. government lab. The earliest reported cases of Lyme disease — an illness resulting from a bite of a tick infested with the bacterium Borrelia burgdorferi — predate any biological weapons program in the U.S. by thousands of years.
A genetic analysis published in the journal Nature Communications in February 2012 found evidence of Lyme disease in a 5,300-year-old mummy from the Italian Alps, calling the discovery the “earliest documented case” of Lyme disease in a human.
Many proponents of this narrative point to the U.S. government-owned Plum Island Animal Disease Center in Plum Island, New York, as the creator of the purported Lyme disease bioweapon. These sources point both to the center’s proximity to Lyme, Connecticut — where the disease was first identified in 1975 — and the fact that it was once used by the U.S. Army for biological weapons research.
The American Lyme Disease Foundation states on its website that there is “ample evidence” to indicate that Lyme-infected ticks were present in the U.S. “well before the Plum Island facility was ever established.”
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If you see or hear something that you think may be provably false, please alert NewsGuard via realitycheck@newsguardtech.com and we'll do our best to get to the bottom of it. Note: Tips should not include content that you simply disagree with, however strongly.
4. Faked Trump Post Cited by Conservatives to Mock Selena Gomez
What happened: Conservatives are citing what turned out to be a fabricated Donald Trump social media post to claim that the president mocked actress Selena Gomez after she posted a video on Instagram criticizing Trump’s deportation policies. At one point in the video, Gomez choked up.
A closer look: The post, which has the appearance of having been posted on Trump’s Truth Social account, stated:
“Many Hollywood liberals have taken our actions to secure the border very personally, and are no doubt surprised that the government finally did something, after years of inaction. Actress Selena Gomez, best known as the third amigo on that murder mystery show that Chevy Chase wouldn’t touch, posted a video to social media where she was in tears over the deportations. Selena, these are people who broke the law by coming here! Some have also committed other horrible crimes. I hope Selena is just as upset about the victims of these crimes. Focus on your career - the people want a sequel to Spring Breakers!”
Conservative X user Liz Churchill posted a screenshot of the supposed post on Jan. 27, garnering 3 million views and 61,000 likes in two days.
Right-wing X user @Antunes1 received 353,000 views and 13,000 likes in a post with the screenshot that stated, “Trump responds to Selena Gomez’s meltdown.”
Actually: The post, while convincingly styled, never appeared on Trump’s Truth Social account, NewsGuard determined.
While the profile picture and username match Trump’s authentic Truth Social account, the actual platform displays the time in hours as “h,” as opposed to “hrs,” as seen in the fabricated screenshot. See below:
Although Trump himself has not addressed Gomez’s video, his “border czar” Tom Homan said on Fox News (Trust Score: 69.5/100): “We got a half a million children who were sex trafficked into this country, separated from their families, put in the hands of criminal cartels to be smuggled into the country. This administration can’t find over 300,000. Where’s the tears for them?”
Zooming out: Other bogus Trump Truth Social posts have gained high engagement across social media platforms, as previously reported in Reality Check.
These posts can appear believable and are especially difficult for users to confirm as authentic because most social media users do not maintain active accounts on Truth Social. In December 2024, Truth Social registered 13.5 million visits, dwarfed by X’s 4.5 billion visits in the same period, according to website analytics tool SimilarWeb.
As Trump continues to use his social media platform to deliver official statements, a small fraction of Americans actually sees his posts firsthand.
Reality Check is produced by Co-CEOs Steven Brill and Gordon Crovitz, and the NewsGuard team.
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