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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.

12,751 published reviews in this topic

Fact CrescendoPolitics & government

Claim: tamil nadu govt not announced 2022 may 2 as public holiday

Publisher’s rating: FALSE

The review investigated social-media posts claiming that Tamil Nadu had declared May 2, 2022, a government holiday. It says the posts were being shared as though they came from the online outlet Unmai Arivom:I Tamil News. When the reviewers checked that outlet’s Facebook page, they found no such post there. The review notes that the post might have been removed, but says that did not establish that the claimed holiday had been announced. The relevant context was a request, not a government decision. The review reports that Jawahirullah, leader of the Manithaneya Makkal Katchi, asked the government to make May 2 a holiday because April 30 was Saturday, May 1 was Labour Day, and May 3 was Ramzan. The review says media coverage reported his request, and that some people then circulated the claim as if the holiday had been approved. To check whether there had been an official announcement, the review says its staff contacted the Tamil Nadu government’s Chief Secretary’s office and the Department of Information and Public Relations, and confirmed that the government had made no announcement on the matter. Its conclusion is therefore about the absence of an announced holiday—not whether a request for one had been made.

FACTLYPolitics & government

Portrait of Jawaharlal Nehru on the wall in a room where Modi and Scholz held discussions

Publisher’s rating: FALSE

The claim concerns a specific image of Prime Minister Narendra Modi and German Chancellor Olaf Scholz holding discussions in Germany during Modi’s three-nation Europe tour. FACTLY says the image circulating online showed Jawaharlal Nehru’s portrait on the wall, and reports that it checked the image against versions shared by Modi and the Prime Minister’s Office (PMO). The review identifies the circulating image as one of the pictures Modi shared about the interaction and says the PMO’s Twitter account shared the same image. The review’s central comparison is between the circulating image and the original image shared by Modi. It reports that the original has no Nehru portrait on the wall, while the circulating version does. FACTLY says a comparison of the two images is shown in the review and concludes that the portrait was digitally added. This directly addresses the claim about the room in the discussion image, rather than merely establishing that a portrait of Nehru exists elsewhere. The supplied excerpt describes the comparison and identifies the original image’s provenance, but does not provide technical details about image-editing analysis or the underlying image files. The conclusion is therefore supported here by the review’s reported comparison and its identification of Modi’s post as the source image.

dpaPolitics & government

Angela Merkel is de biologische dochter van Adolf Hitler

Publisher’s rating: Angela Merkel is niet de dochter van Adolf Hitler. Er is geen enkele aanwijzing voor én het blijkt fysiek onmogelijk. De claim kadert binnen de complottheorie van QAnon, die wereldleiders als deel van een satanistische elite afschildert.

The review examines a Facebook post that presented Merkel as Hitler’s biological daughter alongside claims that she and Emmanuel Macron were satanists, while Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin belonged to an anti-satanist alliance. It also checked the post’s photo and video, which appeared to show Putin greeting Trump while ignoring Merkel and Macron. The review tested the parentage claim against the reported timeline: Hitler died on 30 April 1945, while Merkel was born on 17 July 1954—about nine years later. It notes that making the claim possible would require Hitler to have lived longer than generally accepted or his sperm to have been preserved. The review says French scientists who examined Hitler’s teeth in 2018 confirmed the account that he died by suicide with Eva Braun in his Berlin bunker. It also reports that sperm-freezing technology was not available until 1949, four years after Hitler’s death. The review identifies Merkel’s father as Horst Kasner and says her family tree is well documented, with no evidence linking Hitler to it. For the post’s video, it traces the footage to the 11 November 2018 Armistice centenary in Paris and says the original footage shows Putin greeting all three leaders, not only Trump. The post’s depiction of Trump as “Q+” is presented as a clue to the claim’s QAnon framing.

FACTLYPolitics & government

A Mexican MP stripped in the Parliament, while addressing about hunger, poverty, and unemployment prevailing in the country

Publisher’s rating: MISLEADING

The post paired an image of a Mexican legislator who had stripped in Parliament with a claim that he did so while addressing hunger, poverty, and unemployment. The review says the image does show a Mexican member of Parliament stripping, but the event dates to 2013. It identifies the legislator as Antonio Garcia Conejo, an opposition Democratic Revolution Party member, and gives a different explanation for his protest. According to the review, Garcia Conejo stripped to oppose passage of a new energy law, rather than to protest the country’s social conditions. The law opened the state-controlled oil sector to foreign investment. The review also describes opposition to provisions allowing private oil and gas companies to drill alongside state-run Pemex in exchange for a share of profits. Thus, the image itself was not fabricated, but the post misrepresented the occasion and reason for the protest. The article reports that its Google search using relevant keywords found multiple 2013 news reports showing similar images. It says those reports described Garcia Conejo stripping to show rejection of the energy bill, and that none stated he acted against hunger, poverty, and unemployment. On the evidence described in the review, the post attached a false motive to a real, earlier parliamentary protest.

dpaPolitics & government

Zelensky a signé une loi sur les premières étapes de la grande réinitialisation de Klaus Schwab et introduit une application de crédit social en Ukraine.

Publisher’s rating: Il n’existe aucun lien entre l’application ukrainienne Diia et l’initiative du Forum économique mondial appelée la « Grande Réinitialisation » (« Great Reset »). Rien ne prouve non plus que le président ukrainien Volodymyr Zelensky ait introduit ou ait l'intention d'introduire un système de crédit social.

The claim combines several assertions: that Volodymyr Zelensky signed a law marking the first steps of Klaus Schwab’s “Great Reset,” and that Ukraine introduced a social-credit app combining a universal basic income, digital identification and vaccination records. The investigation focuses on the Ukrainian government app Diia and whether the government or the World Economic Forum connected it to those proposals. The review describes Diia as a service for storing digital documents, including driving licences, and accessing government services online. It also says users can generate Covid vaccination certificates through the app. But the review reports finding no Ukrainian government plan for a social-credit system linked to Diia, and no evidence that Zelensky planned to create such a system. It distinguishes financial assistance available through Diia to people who lost work or housing because of the war from a universal basic income, which it says Ukraine did not have. The chronology also undermines the alleged Great Reset connection: the review says Diia was developed from 2019 and launched in February 2020, before the World Economic Forum presented the Great Reset in June 2020. It reports that searches of the Ukrainian president’s and Forum’s websites found no announcement linking the app to the initiative, and that a Forum spokesperson told USA Today there was no such link. These findings address the claim’s central connection, rather than establishing that Zelensky signed the alleged law.