Liberals Falsely Claim Project 2025 Defunds National Weather Service
PLUS: Israel-Hamas War’s Mounting Misinformation Toll; Iran’s Misleading Footage Claims Success in its Attack on Israel
Welcome to Reality Check, your inside look at how misinformation online is undermining trust — and who’s behind it.
Today:
As Hurricane Helene roared, liberals spread bogus claim that Project 2025 aims to defund the National Weather Service
At one-year mark of Israel-Hamas War, 202 false claims and counting
Iranian media cite old, irrelevant videos to depict chaos in Israel after Iran’s missile strikes
And more…
Today’s newsletter was edited by Jack Brewster, Eric Effron, and Sofia Rubinson.
1. Cloudy Forecast: Liberal Accounts Falsely Claim Project 2025 Calls for Eliminating the National Weather Service
What happened: Liberal social media accounts are using Hurricane Helene’s destructive path across the American South as a news hook to falsely claim that the conservative Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 calls for eliminating the National Weather Service (NWS).
A closer look: While this claim appears to have been circulating online since July 2024, it resurfaced as parts of the U.S. got slammed with harsh weather conditions in late September.
On Sept. 27, 2024, the day Hurricane Helene made landfall in Florida, the liberal political action committee Really American PAC posted on X: “As you see more and more videos of devastation from ‘once in a century’ hurricanes, it bears mentioning that Donald Trump's Project 2025 would eliminate the National Weather Service.” The PAC’s post was reposted 2,200 times and accrued 123,000 views by Sept. 30, 2024.
Actually: NewsGuard reviewed Project 2025’s policy proposal for a second Trump administration and found that it does not call for the elimination of the NWS, which provides weather forecasts, forecasting data, and severe weather alerts.
Instead, Project 2025’s “Mandate for Leadership” report suggests that the agency change part of its role and pivot away from its own public forecasting, in favor of focusing “on its data-gathering services” that inform forecasts from private companies such as AccuWeather.
A spokesperson for the Heritage Foundation told NewsGuard in a September 2024 email that “Project 2025 … does not call for the elimination of NWS,” adding, “The claim is false and ridiculous — anyone can read the Mandate for Leadership on our website for free to see what we actually call for.”
By the numbers: On X, there were 75,200 mentions of “National Weather Service,” and “Project 2025” — many making some variation of the false claim — between Sept. 22 and Sept. 30, 2024, according to a social media monitoring tool used by NewsGuard.
Context: This is not the first time liberals have misrepresented the 922-page Project 2025 document.
As we previously reported in Reality Check, left-leaning accounts have claimed that Project 2025 will eliminate Social Security, ban Muslims from the U.S., and mandate “period passports” for women. None of this is true.
Trump has denied that Project 2025 represents his policy positions, though some of his advisors were involved in the recommendations.
Enter the conspiracy theorists: Hurricane Helene’s destruction also led to a conspiracy theory about weather from the right.
Some conservative social media users are baselessly claiming that Hurricane Helene was created or manipulated through weather-modification technologies. Humans are not currently capable of creating or meaningfully affecting hurricanes.
Republican Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia posted to X on Oct. 3, 2024: “Yes they can control the weather. It’s ridiculous for anyone to lie and say it can’t be done.” The post received 4.5 million views and 21,000 likes in one day.
Sarah Komar contributed reporting.
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2. Brand Victims of the Week: Ads for Slack, BJ’s Wholesale, Virgin Atlantic, the NBA, and Others Fund False Claim that the 2020 Election was ‘Stolen’
In this Reality Check feature, NewsGuard identifies global brands that inadvertently support the spread of misinformation by funneling programmatic advertising dollars to sites that repeatedly peddle false claims. Unless advertisers use inclusion or exclusion lists, their ads appear on websites regardless of their trustworthiness.
This week: A NewsGuard analyst based in the U.S. was shown programmatic ads for Slack, BJ’s Wholesale, Virgin Atlantic, the NBA, Wynn Resorts, the Vitamin Shoppe, and Babbel on an article published by the WorldTribune.com (NewsGuard Trust Score: 20/100). The article falsely claimed that mail-in voting during the 2020 U.S. presidential election led to massive voter fraud.
Representatives for Slack, BJ’s Wholesale, Virgin Atlantic, the NBA, Wynn Resorts, and Babbel did not immediately respond to NewsGuard’s emailed requests for comment. A representative for the Vitamin Shoppe declined to comment.
(Disclosure: NewsGuard is among the companies that license data that would help advertisers only advertise on reliable, brand suitable news sites.)
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. One Year of War, 200 Myths: NewsGuard Has Now Identified 202 False Narratives About the Israel-Hamas War
Since Palestinian militant group Hamas carried out a terrorist attack on Israel one year ago, sparking an Israel invasion of Gaza, NewsGuard’s analysts have debunked 202 false narratives related to the Israel-Hamas war and identified 389 websites spreading these false narratives.
A closer look: The 389 websites identified as having spread Israel-Hamas war-related disinformation, a sampling of which is available on NewsGuard’s Israel-Hamas Tracking Center, range from high-profile Iranian state media outlets to obscure, anonymously-run websites. Some of the most widespread myths from the past year have included:
The false claim that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s supposed psychiatrist died by suicide, which traveled from an unreliable AI-generated website to Iranian state TV.
The false claim that conclusive evidence has determined that Israel was behind the October 2023 Gaza hospital blast. (See NewsGuard’s Misinformation Fingerprint on this claim here.)
The false claim that Hamas militants decapitated 40 infants at a kibbutz, which was spread widely by Western media and repeated by the White House and eventually debunked by Israel.
Some common themes …
Atrocity Denial: In the early stages of the conflict, NewsGuard debunked misinformation aimed at denying documented Hamas attacks, including the false claim that Hamas did not rape or sexually assault women and the false claim that Houthi attacks on Red Sea shipping only target Israeli-affiliated vessels.
Staging Deaths: NewsGuard has debunked eight false narratives equally from both sides accusing the other of staging deaths or injuries.
Fake Embassy Closures: NewsGuard has debunked five false narratives targeting the operations of embassies, including the false narrative that Brazil closed its Israeli embassy to protest the war and the false claim that Canada evacuated its embassy in Damascus before the neighboring Iranian embassy was leveled by an Israeli airstrike on April 1, 2024.
Phony News Reports: NewsGuard has identified 10 false narratives based on fabricated news reports imitating credible media outlets — such as the false claim that The Washington Post published an article in November 2023 headlined, “Weapons supplies from Ukraine to Hamas have tripled over the past month.”
Follow the money: NewsGuard has found that of the 389 websites that have spread misinformation about the Israel-Hamas war, 229 earn programmatic advertising revenue, typically placed on behalf of blue-chip brands without their knowledge or intention. This system, intended to optimize advertising efficiency, results in billions of dollars in ads being placed on misinformation and disinformation websites, inadvertently funding low-quality content.
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. Pro-Iran Accounts Cite Old, Unrelated Videos to Depict Aftermath of Iran’s Missile Attack on Israel
By McKenzie Sadeghi and Chiara Vercellone
What happened: Following Iran’s missile strike on Israel last week, Iranian state media and pro-Palestinian accounts posted unrelated and out-of-context videos, falsely claiming they depicted chaos in Israel.
Context: On Oct. 1, 2024, Iran launched at least 180 missiles into Israel, most of which were intercepted, in what Iran said was retaliation for the killings of military leaders of its proxies Hezbollah and Hamas, according to news reports.
A closer look: Iranian and other sources posted videos — some from long ago and far away — claiming they depicted explosions and panic in Israel following the Iranian attack.
A video showing Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu running was widely cited as showing him fleeing to a bunker amid the missile strike.
Actually: The video was filmed in December 2021 and shows Netanyahu running through the corridors of the Knesset, Israel’s parliament, to participate in an emergency voting session. Netanyahu himself posted the video to X on Dec. 13, 2021, with the caption: “I’m always proud to run for you. This was filmed half an hour ago in the Knesset.”
A video showing a large explosion was falsely said to show a successful missile attack on the Mossad headquarters in Tel Aviv, Israel’s intelligence agency.
Actually: The video depicts a series of explosions in August 2015 in a factory in the Chinese city of Tianjin.
A video showing a missile strike on an urban center was falsely said to show a bombardment on Tel Aviv.
Actually: The video shows a Ukrainian drone attack in Moscow in July 2023.
Where it spread: The videos were shared by pro-Iranian accounts and in Arabic, English, French, and Persian on social media platforms including X, Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube.
U.S. commentator Jackson Hinkle, who NewsGuard has found to be an Israel-Hamas misinformation superspreader, posted the video of Netanyahu running on X on Oct. 1 with the caption: “HAHAHA THIS GENOCIDAL B**** IS RUNNING TO HIS BUNKER! GOD BLESS IRAN!” The post received 2.6 million views and 44,000 likes in two days.
Pro-Iranian X user @Alymnyabdalslam posted a video of a bombing in Moscow with the caption, in Arabic, “Huge explosion in Tel Aviv at Mossad headquarters,” garnering more than 750,000 views and 16,000 likes in two days.
These claims were also advanced by sites that NewsGuard has found previously to share misinformation about the Israel-Hamas war including the Pravda network (Trust Score 7.5/100), a network of more than 80 sites publishing pro-Kremlin disinformation in dozens of languages, and Iranian state-run news outlet Mehr News (Trust Score: 5/100).
This is not the first time Iranian media outlets have spread old and irrelevant military footage following its attacks against Israel. After Iran fired missiles at Israel in April 2024, Iran’s state-run news aired footage of forest fires and missile strikes from 2020 in Syria, claiming it showed the aftermath of the Israel strikes.
5. One more thing … Conspiracy Theorist Stew Peters Shares a Satirical Post Claiming Buttigieg Has HIV
Social media is approaching peak absurdity: Misinformation superspreaders now appear to be sharing false claims from accounts that are themselves satirical takes on X accounts known for spreading false claims.
What happened: On Oct. 3, Stew Peters, a prolific conspiracy theorist, shared a post from a satirical account on X stating that U.S. Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg, who is gay, has been diagnosed with HIV.
It turns out that the account that Peters cited — @Breaking911onX — is actually a parody of an X account site with a similar name, @Breaking911, which has more than a million followers and its own history of spreading misinformation.
Confusing, we know: Think of it this way: A known spreader of false information (Peters) shared a fake news story from a parody account (@Breaking911onX) whose purpose is to mock another misinformation source (@Breaking911).
A closer look: Peters, a conservative commentator who has advanced a dozen false claims in NewsGuard’s database of significant false narratives, posted a screenshot of a post shared by @Breaking911onX that stated: “BREAKING: Pete Buttigieg reveals he is HIV positive.” Alongside the screenshot, Peters wrote: “You don’t say 😳 😱.”
The post gained significant traction, amassing over 31,000 interactions and more than 1.7 million views as of October 4, 2024.
In response to a direct message from NewsGuard inquiring about his sourcing and the apparent satirical origin of the claim, Peters said: “I’m SHOCKED that a homosexual would end up getting AIDS. Maybe we can solve this epidemic by banning homosexual acts.”
Actually: There’s no evidence that Buttigieg is HIV positive. As mentioned above, the account @Breaking911onX is a satirical account parodying @Breaking911.
The account’s bio states: “Parody artist. If you fell for my bait, you owe me eight dollars.”
There’s no evidence that the two Breaking911 accounts are affiliated. NewsGuard sent a direct message to the original Breaking911’s founder, T. Grant Benson, but did not receive a response.
Although NewsGuard could not identify the founder of the satirical account @Breaking911onX, the person behind it appears to have a history of starting accounts on X parodying well-known figures, including Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Tim Walz, and media personality Keith Olbermann. All three accounts were eventually banned. The Cash App handle associated with @Breaking911onX also appeared on the profile of the three banned accounts.
Examples of other fake headlines the satirical Breaking911 account has shared include: “Donald Trump files for divorce from wife Melania, citing infidelity”; “Taylor Swift withdraws Kamala Harris endorsement after Tim Walz debate performance”; and “Joe Biden calls Tim Walz a ‘stupid bastard’ during post-debate trip to Waffle House.”
Context: This is one of many false claims in recent weeks to have started as satire before being spread deceptively as fact. Read more from NewsGuard Editorial Director Eric Effron.
NewsGuard sent an email message to the Department of Transportation inquiring about the claim about its secretary, but did not receive a response. NewsGuard was unable to locate contact information for @Breaking911onX, who does not accept direct messages on X.
Buttigieg’s husband, Chasten Buttigieg, addressed the matter on X, responding to a post by Tim Miller, a writer for The Bulwark, who stated: “Today I saw a MAGA pundit credulously share a post about Sec. Pete having HIV. 500k views.” Chasten stated, in part: “This is not how you win hearts and minds. … They’ve got lies, we’ve got momentum.”
Fake Local News Sites Tracker: 1,280 Sites and Counting
In June 2024, NewsGuard reported that so-called pink slime websites — sites posing as independent news outlets but secretly funded by partisan groups — now outnumber daily newspapers in the U.S. Below, we track the spread of pink slime websites, as compared to Northwestern Local News Initiative’s count of daily newspapers. (Northwestern’s tracker was last updated in December 2023.)
Reality Check is produced by co-CEOs Steven Brill and Gordon Crovitz, and the NewsGuard team.
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