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PeakMetrics / Fact Checks

Politics & government fact checks

Explore claims publishers have checked about politics & government. Read their original ratings and follow the evidence.

12,749 published reviews in this topic

Fact Crescendo Sri LankaPolitics & government

ජනපති රනිල් වික්‍රමසිංහගේ නිවසේ ඡායාරූපයක් ද?

Publisher’s rating: False

The claim concerned a social-media photograph presented as showing Sri Lankan President Ranil Wickremesinghe’s residence enclosed by tall coils of wire. The investigation says the image circulated with that implication on Facebook and Twitter. Its reverse-image search found that the photograph had already been circulating on social media among people in Myanmar from the preceding April, before Sri Lanka’s public protests and while Gotabaya Rajapaksa was president. The review says it had not established the original details of the photograph, so it did not claim to identify the place shown in it. The review also reports that Sri Lanka’s Presidential Media Division said the pictured property was neither the president’s official residence nor his private home, and that neither residence had coils of wire like those in the image. This directly addresses the identification at the heart of the claim, while the image’s earlier circulation in Myanmar provides separate evidence against its being a new photograph of Wickremesinghe’s home. The article distinguishes this photograph from a real attack on Wickremesinghe’s private residence: it says his Colombo Fifth Lane home was set on fire in July, when he was prime minister. It also notes that footage of a protest outside his home on May 7 did not show the tall wire coils depicted in the circulated image. Those events provide context, but the review does not present them as the source of the photograph.

dpaPolitics & government

Deze beelden tonen aan dat Ceaușescu niet werkelijk is doodgeschoten op 25 december 1989.

Publisher’s rating: Op 25 december 1989 werden Nicolae Ceauşescu en zijn vrouw Elena geëxecuteerd op een militaire basis in de stad Târgoviște. Het proces dat hieraan vooraf ging, en de executie zelf, werden gefilmd en de beelden hiervan zijn online te vinden. Deze komen niet overeen met het social media filmpje; dat blijkt een uitsnede van een korte artistieke film uit 1991 te zijn.

The post presented a 20-second video as evidence that the 25 December 1989 execution of Nicolae and Elena Ceaușescu had been staged: after footage of Ceaușescu apparently dead, the video shows him getting up and helping his wife. The investigation traced the clip to a short artistic film, rather than treating it as a continuous record of the execution. It identifies the film as Swiss director Richard Vetterli’s 1991 work, “nicolae & elena,” and says the viral clip combines two scenes from it. The review distinguishes the film’s staged scenes from archival footage by comparing what appears in each. It reports that the real execution was filmed by a military journalist on 25 December 1989, and that archival footage of the trial and execution is available. The film’s execution scene was shot in front of a different building in Geneva; the review also notes differences in the buildings and in the actors’ appearance and presentation. Vetterli told dpa by email that he combined existing footage of the trial and execution with fictional scenes he filmed himself. The clip’s displayed time also does not fit the reported event chronology: the review cites a report that the execution took place at 16:00, whereas the social-media video displays 11:34. Within the clip, the time advances across a visible cut, and people seen shortly before the cut are absent afterward. The investigation therefore identifies the apparent “resurrection” as an edited transition between fictional scenes, not evidence that Ceaușescu survived. It also reports that the remains identified as Nicolae’s were confirmed as his; it records that the available material for Elena was insufficient for a definitive identification.