Introducing the RFK Jr. Healthcare Claims Depository
Plus: Russians Post Fake Trump-Putin AI Images to Celebrate Election; False Project 2025 Claims Surge; Iran Touts Fake Trump Quote
Welcome to Reality Check, your inside look at how misinformation online is undermining trust — and who’s behind it.
Our work is more important than ever. Please support us by becoming a Member.
Today:
Introducing the RFK Jr. Healthcare Claims Depository
Photo finish: Pro-Kremlin accounts push fake photos of Trump and Putin celebrating Trump win
Trump’s victory sparks new wave of false Project 2025 claims
Iranian sources advance a bogus Trump quote calling Iran a ‘powerful nation’ and praising its leaders
And more …
Today’s newsletter was edited by Eric Effron and Sofia Rubinson.
BUT FIRST:
Misinformation Quiz: Want to see how well you can distinguish fact from fiction? Select whether you think this narrative is real or fake to test your misinformation spotting skills. Scroll to the bottom to see if you were correct with NewsGuard’s fact check!
1. Introducing the RFK Jr. Healthcare Claims Depository
By John Gregory
As President-elect Donald Trump looks ahead to his second term, he has said that Robert F. Kennedy Jr. would have “a big role in health care.” We are launching the RFK Jr. Healthcare Claims Depository to compile the provably false claims Kennedy and his Children’s Health Defense anti-vaccine nonprofit have advanced since 2018.
You can access the Depository by clicking here.
Become a Reality Check Member and Get These Exclusive Benefits
Want to get smarter about misinformation? Become a Reality Check Member today and you'll get:
A free copy of the definitive book on the misinformation crisis, The Death of Truth by bestselling author Steven Brill ($30 value)
Exclusive members-only content and digital briefings
Free access to NewsGuard's browser extension that shows reliability ratings for 10K+ news sites right in your browser ($25 value)
2. Pro-Kremlin Media Shares AI-Generated Photos of Trump and Putin Celebrating the Election
Toasting malign influence?
What happened: Pro-Russian social media accounts marked the election victory of Donald Trump by promoting AI-generated photos of Trump celebrating with Russian President Vladimir Putin. The apparent aim of the effort was to assert a bond between the two leaders and to push the narrative that Trump’s victory threatens U.S. military aid for Ukraine and the Western alliance more generally.
A closer look: The photos, one purporting to show Putin and Trump toasting with wine glasses at a restaurant and another supposedly depicting the pair toasting themselves with a selfie, emerged on social media on Nov. 6, 2024, the day after the election.
In a post on Russian social network VK that generated 82,000 views, Russia-based Rostov News shared the photos with the caption, “The first photos of Trump after winning the election have appeared.”
Pro-Kremlin X user @GabeZZOZZ, who NewsGuard has found to have previously advanced false claims about the Russia-Ukraine war, stated on X: “I want to see them both drinking champagne in Kiev, celebrating Russian victory and peace in the world.” The images were also shared by the anonymously run Pravda network (NewsGuard Trust Score: 7.5/100) and pro-Kremlin activist Simeon Boikov.
Actually: The images are fake.
Multiple AI detection tools, including Hive and TrueMedia, determined that the photos were likely AI-generated, and visual cues further indicate that they are inauthentic. In one photo, the wine glass is lacking a stem, and the flowers in the background appear unnaturally distorted.
The latest publicly available photo of Trump and Putin together is from July 16, 2018, during their summit in Helsinki, Finland.
Context: NewsGuard has extensively tracked Russia’s disinformation campaigns throughout the 2024 U.S. presidential election cycle, which targeted the Harris campaign with wild false claims that aim to sow confusion and distrust. You can read more about the efforts of high-profile Russian operative John Mark Dougan in NewsGuard’s Dougan Russian Disinformation Depository.
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. After Trump Win, Liberals Replay False Project 2025 Claims
What happened: Since Project 2025 entered the political lexicon, liberal social media users have made a variety of false claims about the conservative Heritage Foundation’s proposed policy agenda, as previously reported in Reality Check. Trump’s win brought back many of these false claims and, for good measure, generated some news ones.
By the numbers: Public discussion of Project 2025 surged after Trump was declared the winner. On Nov. 6, there were 277,758 mentions of “Project 2025” on X, a nearly 600 percent increase from the day before, according to a social media analytics tool used by NewsGuard.
A closer look: While much of the chatter about Project 2025 involved vague, doomsday predictions from the left about the agenda’s possible impact, several high-engagement posts pushed previously debunked false claims, while others introduced new ones. Among them:
Claim: “Trump announces he lied about [not knowing anything about] Project 2025 within hours of being declared the winner,” liberal X user Rachel Bitecofer said on Nov. 6, garnering 8.7 million views and 108,000 likes in one day.
Actually: Trump did not make any comments about Project 2025 after winning the presidency. In July, Trump had said on Truth Social: “I know nothing about Project 2025. … Some of the things they’re saying are absolutely ridiculous and abysmal.”
Claim: Liberal X account @mkailasobLIVion posted a graphic on Nov. 6 titled “The Trump-Vance Project 2025 Plan” claiming that Project 2025 calls for “pardon[ing] violent January 6 criminal insurrectionists.” The post received 27.4 million views and 462,000 likes in one day.
Actually: The Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol is only mentioned in one paragraph of Project 2025, which blamed the Secret Service for allowing then-Vice President-elect Kamala Harris to be inside the Democratic National Committee office when a pipe bomb was outside. “This high-profile incident of danger to a protectee remains unresolved,” the document stated.
Claim: Liberal X user @newjeanas posted the same “Trump-Vance Project 2025 Plan” graphic alongside the text: “I also think it’s important to add that woman will have to track their periods and pregnancies to make sure we aren’t getting abortions.” The Nov. 6 post garnered 1.5 million views and 16,000 likes in one day.
Actually: A NewsGuard analysis of the document found no mentions of menstruation, and Project 2025 does not call for pregnancy monitoring.
Come across a post making a potential false claim about Project 2025? Send it to realitycheck@newsguardtech.com — We’ll investigate.
If you see something, say something
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. One More Thing … Lost in Translation: Pro-Iranian Sources Spread Fake Trump Quote Praising Islamic Leaders
What happened: Iranian state-affiliated sources are falsely claiming that in his 2015 book “Crippled America,” Donald Trump described Iran as a “powerful nation” under its religious leadership. However, the claim relies on a faulty translation.
Context: This claim emerged on Nov. 6, 2024, after Trump was projected to win the 2024 election, which caused Iran’s currency to fall to an all-time low, according to news reports.
In the lead-up to the election, Iran had openly threatened to assassinate Trump and his former national security aides over the Jan. 3, 2020, killing of top Iranian general Qasem Soleimani by an American drone strike. The Trump administration targeted Soleimani because he was “actively developing plans to attack U.S. diplomats and service members in Iraq and throughout the region,” according to the U.S. Department of Defense.
A closer look: In an apparent attempt to project strength amid economic struggles, pro-Iranian sources claimed that Trump strongly praised Iran and its theocracy.
Pro-Iranian social media users posted a photo of a page from Trump’s book translated in Persian, with the text stating, “Trump says in the book ‘Crippled America’: ‘Iran is a powerful nation as long as religious hardliners govern it.’”
The claim appears to have originated with a Nov. 6, 2024, Telegram post from Bisimchi Media, a channel linked to Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, which earlier that same day posted a video depicting Trump in the crosshairs of a sniper and spitting up blood.
Actually: Trump did not describe Iran as a powerful nation in his 2015 book.
A NewsGuard search of “Crippled America” found that Trump actually said, “Iran was a powerful nation until religious fanatics took over. As long as those people remain in power, Iran will be our enemy and a threat to Israel’s existence.”
More context: On Nov. 8, the FBI announced that an Iranian man and two others were arrested and charged in connection with an Iranian plot to assassinate Trump before the presidential election.
Misinformation Quiz Answer: Truth!
A Chinese student at the University of Michigan faces criminal charges for attempting to cast an illegal ballot in Ann Arbor, Michigan. According to The Associated Press (Trust Score: 95/100), the unnamed student, who is in the United States legally but not a citizen, cast a ballot after registering to vote with a University of Michigan student identification card and local residency documents. The local clerk's office took swift action when made aware and referred the case to law enforcement, officials said.
Reality Check is produced by Co-CEOs Steven Brill and Gordon Crovitz, and the NewsGuard team.
We launched Reality Check after seeing how much interest there is in our work beyond the business and tech communities that we serve. Subscribe to this newsletter to support our apolitical mission to counter misinformation for readers, brands, and democracies. Have feedback? Send us an email: realitycheck@newsguardtech.com.