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Fox News‘ last-minute decision to pay nearly $800 million to avert a trial over accusations it defamed Dominion Voting System by broadcasting false statements that the 2020 presidential election was stolen is paying off.

A New York state supreme court judge, in an order issued Wednesday, found that Smartmatic must face Fox News’ counterclaims accusing the voting machine company of trying to suppress the network’s speech by bringing a $2.7 billion lawsuit. The court grounded the reasoning, in part, on the absence of a verdict concluding that Fox News defamed Dominion Voting Systems.

“There remained a triable issue of fact for trial in that action as to whether defendants acted with actual malice, which is an element that plaintiffs need to prove here as well,” the order stated.

But in a win for Smartmatic, New York Supreme Justice David Cohen refused to dismiss its suit against Fox. He found that the company “sufficiently alleged” that the network’s employees “played an affirmative role in the publication of the defamation at issue.”

“Moreover, plaintiffs have sufficiently alleged that Corp. employees acted with malice by purposely and deliberating publishing knowingly false stories about plaintiffs in order to benefit Corp.’s financial interests,” Cohen wrote.

Despite a $788 million settlement to resolve a similar suit brought by Dominion Voting Systems, Fox continues to face mounting legal troubles over broadcasting far-right conspiracy theories that the 2020 election was stolen with the help of voting technology companies. Last year, Fox Corp.’s board of directors was sued for allegedly adopting a business model centered on chasing profits by intentionally broadcasting falsehoods and disregarding the risk of exposing itself to defamation claims.

The dispute centers on allegations that Fox, in an attempt to boost ratings, capitalized on the popularity of former President Donald Trump by fabricating a narrative that Smartmatic caused him to unfairly lose the election.

The defamatory statements at issue in the case: Smartmatic is a Venezuelan company under the control of corrupt dictators from socialist and communist countries; its election technology was used in six swing states with close outcomes; its software was designed to “rig” elections, and did so by switching votes; and that the company had been banned from participating in prior elections in the United States.

After the court in 2022 refused to dismiss the suit, Fox filed a counterclaim under a New York law allowing for the early dismissal of complaints intended to chill free speech. It argued that the request for over $2.7 billion is exaggerated and meant to stifle its First Amendment rights.

While the judge found that Smartmatic’s suit has a “substantial basis in law,” he found that the company failed to establish that there’s a “binding determination” that its claims are valid.

“Defendants’ argument here is that plaintiffs’ alleged damages are so extenuated from their actual lost profits that they were pleaded and/or sought in order to chill defendants’ free speech rights,” the order stated. “That argument has not yet been adjudicated in any court.”

Even if the court’s decision in favor of Dominion on summary judgment does apply to this case, which he clarified it does not, Cohen said that there was still a “triable issue of fact” over whether Fox acted with actual malice — an element to defamation that Smartmatic will also have to prove in its suit.

The court’s order issued Wednesday advanced claims from both sides. Declining to dismiss the suit against Fox, Cohen pointed to allegations against executives accused of participating in the alleged scheme, including former chairman Rupert Murdoch and his successor, Lachlan Murdoch. The Murdochs were alleged to have full editorial control and decision-making authority over the network, with the authority to run a correction or retraction.

CNN
 — 

Former President Donald Trump made several false claims in a speech Tuesday night after CNN and other media outlets projected that he would win the Republican presidential primary in New Hampshire.

CNN also watched rival candidate Nikki Haley’s Tuesday night speech in New Hampshire; Haley’s claims were either accurate or too general to fact check. Here is a fact check of some of Trump’s assertions.

Trump repeated some of his familiar lies about the 2020 presidential election.

At one point, he claimed, as he has repeatedly in the past, that “they used Covid to cheat.” At another point, he claimed that in addition to winning in 2016, “we also won in 2020 – by more. And we did much better in 2020 than we did in 2016.” He dismissively said, “But as they said, we lost by a whisker.”

Facts First: Trump’s claims are false. He lost the 2020 election fair and square to Joe Biden, by a 306 to 232 margin in the Electoral College, and also lost New Hampshire in that election. There remains no evidence of any fraud even close to widespread enough to have changed the outcome in any state.

Democrats and taxes

Trump Tuesday night said, “Do they hate our country? They must hate our country. Because there’s no other reason that they can be doing the things they do. Take a look – the taxes, they want to raise your taxes times four.”

Facts First: This is false. Neither Biden nor other top Democrats are proposing anything close to quadrupling people’s taxes.

CNN previously fact-checked a similar Trump claim that “they want to double, triple everything.”

Howard Gleckman, senior fellow in the Urban-Brookings Tax Policy Center at the Urban Institute think tank, said in a November email: “I don’t know what ‘they want to double, triple everything’ means. But if he’s suggesting that Biden would ‘double, triple’ federal income taxes, he’s just making up numbers. There is no evidence to support that claim.”

Gleckman said his organization’s analysis of Biden’s budget proposal for fiscal 2024, which included his most recent tax plan, found that the major tax provisions would “would raise taxes by an average of $2,290, or reduce taxable income by 2.3 percent.”

Trump claimed that he has always won the state – not only in Republican primaries but in general elections.

“You know we won New Hampshire three times now three. We win it every time. We win the primary. We win the generals. We won it and it’s a very, very special place to me.” Trump said.

Facts First: Trump’s claim is false. He lost New Hampshire to Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton in the 2016 general election and to Democratic candidate Joe Biden in the 2020 general election, though he did win the Republican primary each time.

Criticizing Republican New Hampshire Gov. Chris Sununu, a supporter of Haley, Trump said that because of Sununu’s incompetence, “in the Republican primary, they accepted Democrats to vote. In fact, I think they had 4,000 Democrats – Democrats before October 6 – they already voted. Now, they’re only voting because they want to make me look as bad as possible.”

Facts First: Trump’s claims are misleading at best. People registered as Democrats were not allowed to vote in New Hampshire’s Republican primary. Only registered Republicans and independents (people registered as “undeclared”) were allowed to cast ballots in that primary. While it’s true that nearly 4,000 people who had been registered as Democrats switched their affiliation to either undeclared or Republican by October 6, the last day to switch in time to potentially cast a ballot in the GOP primary, it’s not yet clear how many of these people actually ended up voting. And it’s important to note that New Hampshire made its primaries open to independents decades before Sununu became governor in 2017.

Also, while Trump was complaining about people formerly registered as Democrats being permitted to vote in the Republican primary, it is standard for states to allow people to switch affiliations by a certain date in order to participate in another party’s primary – and some states have switching deadlines closer to an election day than New Hampshire does. In Trump’s state of Florida, to name one, voters can switch from Democratic to Republican by February 20 and cast a ballot in the Republican primary in the early voting window that begins less than three weeks later or in person a month later on the March 19 election day. (Unlike in New Hampshire, independents can’t cast Republican primary ballots there.)

Finally, the motivations of the recent New Hampshire affiliation-switchers are not nearly as clear as Trump suggested. While some might have indeed switched with the sole intention of opposing him, some others might have sincerely decided that they no longer saw themselves as Democrats. There was all kinds of affiliation-switching before October 6. For example, the New Hampshire Bulletin reported that 719 people switched from Republican to undeclared and 132 people switched from undeclared to Republican.

PolitiFact has hit a milestone: We published our 1,000th rated fact-check of Donald Trump.

In classic Trump fashion, he claimed in his New Hampshire primary victory speech Jan. 23 that Democrats used the COVID-19 pandemic to “cheat” in the 2020 presidential election. 

Unsurprisingly to our regular readers, his claim was Pants on Fire.

It’s not unusual for politicians of both parties to mislead, exaggerate or make stuff up. But American fact-checkers have never encountered a politician who shares Trump’s disregard for factual accuracy. 

Our fact-checking saga of Trump began in 2011, when he used his celebrity to amplify “birther” conspiracy theories to undermine former President Barack Obama’s eligibility. The pace of our checks intensified in 2015, with his surprise Republican primary ascent and his 2016 defeat of Hillary Clinton. Trump’s turbulent policy-by-Twitter updates kept our reporters sprinting during his presidential tenure. He downplayed the COVID-19 public health threat and fanned persistent falsehoods about voting and election results that culminated in the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol.

Trump’s fast-and-loose style surely endears him to some of his supporters, who propelled him to the White House in 2016 and made him the Republican front-runner to challenge President Joe Biden in 2024.

The 45th president stands apart — and the election year has barely started. Here’s what our fact-checking data shows us about his Truth-O-Meter record so far.

It will be some time before another politician hits 1,000 ratings. After Trump, our three most-fact-checked politicians are all Democrats: former President Barack Obama with 603 fact-checks, 2016 Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton with 301, and President Joe Biden with 286.

Trump stands alone for the share of rated claims that are some degree of false. About 76% of his statements earned ratings of Mostly False, False or Pants on Fire. The median rating for his 1,000 checks is False.

More than 18% of our fact-checks of Trump landed at Pants on Fire, which we define as a statement that is not just false but ridiculous. 

About a quarter of Trump’s 1,000 rated statements landed on the relatively true side of our meter (True, Mostly True or Half True). Often these involved statistics, such as his accurate tweet in 2019 that said U.S. food stamp program participation had hit a 10-year low. 

Trump’s median rating of False is worse than a cross-section of frequently checked Democratic and Republican politicians. Politicians with median ratings of Half True include Obama, Biden and Hillary Clinton; three senators who ran for president, Mitt Romney, R-Utah, Marco Rubio, R-Fla., and Bernie Sanders, I-Vt.; and two longtime congressional leaders, Sen. Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., and former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif.

Trump has also fared worse than three frequently checked politicians who have a median rating of Mostly False: Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas; former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, R-Ga.; and Sen. Ron Johnson, R-Wis.

“It’s been an astounding eight years in American politics,” said Jennifer Mercieca, a Texas A&M University communication professor and a historian of American political rhetoric. “He’s built his entire political identity on the fact that he doesn’t owe anyone the truth about anything.”

A relentless flow of ‘truthful hyperbole’

In his 1987 best-seller “The Art of the Deal,” Trump described “why a little hyperbole never hurts.”

“People want to believe that something is the biggest and the greatest and the most spectacular. I call it truthful hyperbole,” Trump wrote. “It’s an innocent form of exaggeration — and a very effective form of promotion.”

That approach held true for politics as it did for business. Ever since he descended the escalator at Trump Tower in 2015, we have encountered a firehose of claims. 

He talks a lot — in TV interviews, on social media, at campaign rallies that stretch for nearly two hours. As president, Trump made Twitter essential reading, before the social media platform exiled him after the Capitol riot. Of the tweets we checked, about 79% rated Mostly False or lower. So far, on his Truth Social platform, we have not yet rated a claim higher than Mostly False.

Among his most common settings for claims, Trump fared best in State of the Union addresses. His median Truth-O-Meter rating for those annual speeches inched into the Half True range.

In practice, we have looked at many more Trump statements than just the 1,000 cited in this article. 

Each of the 1,000 fact-checks has a formal Truth-O-Meter rating. Sometimes, we instead write articles about claims without rating them. Examples include summaries of multiple claims made in a debate, rally or major speech. Other times, a statement is a prediction, or too vague for us to rate, or involves an unanswerable question, such as how courts will rule in the classified documents case. In those cases, we’ll write an explanatory story without a rating. These are not captured in Trump’s Truth-O-Meter scorecard.

The Washington Post’s Fact Checker column sought to collect every statement by Trump during his term that Glenn Kessler and his team determined was false or misleading. They ended up with 30,573 statements. 

Even though these mentions were usually brief rather than fully detailed fact-check articles, and even though they included many repeated claims, compiling the database was “exhausting,” Kessler told us. The database ended up at about 5 million words.

After this experience, Kessler said the Post has capped future efforts at the first 100 days of a new presidency, as the newspaper did for Biden’s 78 false or misleading claims.

If the past is prologue, 2024 will be another peak year for checking Trump. Our rated fact-checks peaked in 2016 and 2020, the two years he ran for president. 

In the beginning, there was birtherism

For Trump’s accusations and insults, accuracy hardly matters.

In 2011, Trump leveraged his TV businessman persona to discredit Obama’s legitimacy as the nation’s elected leader. Trump told an annual conservative conference that the people who went to school with Obama “never saw him, they don’t know who he is.” His accusation was part of “birtherism,” a series of false beliefs that Obama, the first Black president and one with Kenyan lineage, wasn’t a natural-born American citizen. We rated this statement Pants on Fire!

He kept repeating birther claims through his 2015 campaign. In 2016, Trump falsely said Clinton started the rumors about Obama’s birthplace. Clinton supporters circulated the rumor in the 2008 Democratic primary’s final days and after Clinton had conceded to Obama. But the record did not show Clinton or her campaign ever promoting, or starting the birther theory.

In his new campaign, Trump promoted baseless birtherism claims about Republican rival Nikki Haley, a former United Nations ambassador and South Carolina governor who was born on U.S. soil to immigrant parents.

Sometimes it’s easy to fact-check Trump because his statements fly in the face of available video. He tweeted in 2020 that “I never called John (McCain) a loser.” But 2015 video of Trump speaking in Ames, Iowa, showed that he said of McCain, “I never liked him much after” McCain lost the 2008 presidential race, “because I don’t like losers.”

During a 2016 GOP primary debate, Trump said of former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush, that “he said he would take his pants off and moon everybody … nobody reports that.” Bush was making a joke about what he felt was scant press coverage. We rated Trump’s statement Mostly False.  

We have fact-checked many politicians who admit, usually through a spokesperson, that they misspoke. When Trump is challenged on his dubious statements, he typically ignores reporters’ questions or says he shouldn’t have to defend his words.

In November 2015, Trump tweeted an image that crime statistics show Black people kill 81% of white homicide victims. We rated the statistic Pants on Fire. Days later, then-Fox News host Bill O’Reilly told Trump he was wrong. 

“Hey, Bill, Bill, am I gonna check every statistic?” Trump said. “I get millions and millions of people.”

Trump is the three-time winner of our annual Lie of the Year, which we award for the year’s most significant falsehood. He won:

• In 2015 for three outrageous claims in the Republican presidential primary, including the claim about Black people.

• In 2017 for calling claims of Russian election interference a “made-up story.”

• In 2019 for saying a whistleblower got his call with Ukraine’s president “almost completely wrong” when the account was close to the White House’s own transcript.  

Trump shared in our 2020 and 2021 Lies of the Year for his efforts to downplay the threat of COVID-19 and the significance of the Jan. 6 Capitol attack, respectively.

By topic, Trump’s immigration claims stand out

PolitiFact’s focus has been on Trump’s more consequential statements. His rhetoric around immigration often distorts reality. 

Trump campaigned in 2015 and 2016 on a message of fear of immigrants illegally in the U.S. He told Americans that “the Mexican government … they send the bad ones over.” That’s Pants on Fire. Most Mexicans were crossing the border seeking work. There was no evidence that their government sent criminals. 

Trump also wildly misrepresented Democratic policies. In October 2016, he said Clinton would allow 650 million immigrants into the U.S. in one week. That’s an absurd number considering the U.S. population was about half that amount.

In December 2017, Trump said that under the diversity visa lottery program, other countries “give us their worst people” — a distortion of how the U.S. government vets and selects them. 

During the 2020 campaign and Biden’s presidency, Trump continued to use scare tactics, falsely stating that Biden halted virtually all deportations, including of murderers, or planned to give immigrants welfare benefits.

Trump’s falsehoods have fueled threats to democracy

Trump’s ridiculous statements about elections stretch back to 2016, when a few months before Election Day he called elections “rigged.” After he won in 2016, Trump claimed there was “serious voter fraud” in states he lost. It was particularly absurd for him to blame voter fraud for his 2016 loss of California, a state that hadn’t voted for a Republican for president since George H.W. Bush in 1988.

Trump’s election falsehoods increasingly became focused on grievances.

As Trump faced reelection in 2020, he said Biden could win only if the election was rigged. Elections are administered in thousands of local areas nationwide, each with safeguards, making any attempt to “rig” a national election highly improbable.

Trump’s election result denial has poisoned many Americans’ views on voting, misleading the public about how elections are run. 

A December 2023 Washington Post/University of Maryland survey found that about one third of respondents believed there was solid evidence of widespread voter fraud in 2020. 

Gallup found before the 2022 midterms that most Americans were very confident or somewhat confident that the results would be accurately counted. Democrats were more than twice as confident as Republicans, representing the largest gap Gallup has recorded on this measure since 2004.  

One week before the 2020 election, Trump said counting ballots for weeks after Election Day “is totally inappropriate, and I don’t believe that’s by our laws.” However, most ballots are counted quickly; federal law allows states more than a month after the election to check their math, resolve disputes.

In the early morning hours after polls closed, Trump made the ridiculously premature declaration that he had won. Because the ballots were still being counted,  no one could say with any confidence whether Trump or Biden had won. Yet claims that Trump had won prompted Trump’s supporters — some armed — to gather outside of vote counting sites including in Philadelphia and Arizona’s Maricopa County, home to Phoenix.

Trump continued this theme over the next several weeks, telling his supporters of “surprise ballot dumps” and “massive fraud” that did not exist. He told his allies, “Statistically impossible to have lost the 2020 Election. Big protest in D.C. on January 6th. Be there, will be wild!”

More than 1,200 people have been charged in the attack on the U.S. Capitol. Court records show that some have said Trump told them to act. Whether Trump faces consequences for actions to subvert lawful election results remains to be seen in Fulton County, Georgia, and the federal courts.

What is PolitiFact’s role?

Readers sometimes ask us what our endgame is with a politician like Trump. They say our fact-checks don’t keep Trump from repeating his false claims, including lies about the 2020 election.

It’s not our job to silence Trump or force him to change his rhetoric. Nor is it our job to tell voters how they should mark their ballots. 

Our job is to provide factually vetted information to voters so they can make informed choices.

We fact-check all major political parties, holding their leaders and candidates accountable for misleading rhetoric. We write for Americans who are open to considering evidence. And we document for the historical record, including analysts who will study the Trump era for decades to come.

RELATED: These are PolitiFact’s top 10 most-read fact-checks of Donald Trump

RELATED: How Trump fared on 100 campaign promises tracked on our Trump-O-Meter

RELATED: The Principles of the Truth-O-Meter: PolitiFact’s methodology for independent fact-checking

CNN
 — 

Former President Donald Trump repeated a variety of his previous false claims about the Middle East, rival Republican presidential candidate Nikki Haley, Republican Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell and other subjects in an interview that aired Sunday morning on Fox News – notably including his years-old lie that he warned the US not to invade Iraq. Here’s a non-comprehensive roundup.

Trump revived a lie he has been uttering since his 2016 presidential campaign – an assertion that he publicly spoke out against the idea of invading Iraq. He said on Fox: “Going into Iraq was a stupid thing. Remember I used to say: ‘Don’t do it, but if you do it, keep the oil.’”

Facts First: Trump’s claim that he said “Don’t do it” is false; the claim was debunked eight years ago. In reality, Trump did not publicly express opposition to the March 2003 invasion of Iraq before it occurred. In his 2000 book, “The America We Deserve,” Trump argued a military strike on Iraq might be necessary; when radio host Howard Stern asked Trump in September 2002 whether he is “for invading Iraq,” Trump responded, “Yeah, I guess so. I wish the first time it was done correctly”; and Trump did not express a firm opinion about the looming war in a Fox interview in January 2003, saying that “either you attack or don’t attack” and that then-President George W. Bush “has either got to do something or not do something, perhaps.”

Trump began criticizing the war in 2003, but after the invasion, and also said that year that American troops should not be withdrawn from Iraq. He emerged as an explicit opponent of the war in 2004. You can read more here about his shifting positions.

A CNN search in 2019 turned up no examples of Trump saying anything before the war about keeping Iraq’s oil. Trump’s White House did not respond at the time to our request to provide any such evidence.

Trump repeated a claim he has made at various campaign events in recent months, saying Iran intentionally avoided hitting a base that housed US troops in Iraq when it launched missiles toward the base in January 2020 in retaliation for the Trump-ordered assassination of top Iranian general Qasem Soleimani.

Trump claimed on Fox, as he has before, that Iran “called me” to let him know of its plan to deliberately miss. He said, “We knew they weren’t going to hit inside the fort” even though outside observers were left wondering, “How come they all missed?”

Facts First: Trump’s claims that all of Iran’s missiles missed the base are false. As The Washington Post noted in its own fact check late last year, 11 Iranian missiles hit the al-Asad base Iran targeted in the retaliatory attack. The fact that missiles hit the base was confirmed by satellite images, by the Pentagon, and by a CNN visit to the base days after the attack. CNN reported from the scene: “Ten of the 11 missiles struck US positions at the sprawling desert Iraqi airbase. One struck a remote location on the Iraqi military’s side.” CNN reported that “the Iranian missiles, which used on-board guidance systems, managed to shred sensitive US military sites, damaging a special forces compound, and two hangars, in addition to the US drone operators’ housing unit.”

While no US troops were killed, more than 100 were diagnosed with mild traumatic brain injuries. Gen. Mark Milley, who was chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff at the time, told reporters he believed Iran’s intent was to kill; he credited “the defensive techniques that our forces used” for the absence of deaths.

Trump has provided no substantiation for the claim that Iran called him to telegraph the strike and offer reassurance. As The Post reported, Iraq’s prime minister said he received a general warning from Iran that it was about to begin its response and target US troops.

Trump said the New Hampshire primary he won in January was the one place that Haley had a chance to win – claiming that this is “because Democrats are stupidly allowed to vote in the Republican primary, and independents also.”

Facts First: Trump’s claim is false. Registered Democrats aren’t allowed to vote in New Hampshire’s Republican primary. Only registered Republicans and independents are allowed to vote.

Some independents who lean toward Democrats almost certainly participated in the Republican primary, plus some Democrats who switched their affiliation to independent before the early October deadline. But Trump claimed, with no caveats, that Democrats are simply allowed to vote in New Hampshire. That’s not true. (And it is standard for states to allow people to switch affiliations by a certain date to participate in another party’s primary.)

Trump claimed of Haley: “We have a situation where they forgot to apply, I guess, for Indiana. You don’t run and not apply for Indiana. Great state.”

Facts First: This is false. Haley did not forget to apply to be on the Republican primary ballot in Indiana. The filing deadline for the May 7 primary, February 9, has not arrived yet. Trump has previously made a different claim that Haley did not submit enough signatures by the state’s January 30 signature deadline to qualify for the ballot; Haley’s campaign told CNN and other media outlets that this is not true and that she submitted more than enough signatures. 

Regardless, the campaign didn’t forget to apply.

“We’ll be on the ballot. We turned in more than double all the signatures required and they are being verified now as part of the process before the filing deadline on February 9,” Haley campaign spokesperson Olivia Perez-Cubas said in a Sunday email.

In response to a similar claim from Trump, Haley wrote on social media on Friday: “Looks like he’s confused again…”

Mitch McConnell and the Green New Deal

In a clip from the interview that Fox aired Friday, Trump claimed McConnell has supported trillions in spending on “projects that are Green New Deal.” The Green New Deal is a broad congressional resolution, supported by some Democratic legislators, that calls for major investments in a wide variety of environmental, social and economic initiatives.

“Mitch McConnell: I mean, he’s agreed billions of dollars and trillions of dollars for projects that are Green New Deal – you know, I call it the Green New Scam – trillions of dollars for the Green New Scam,” Trump said.

Facts First: Trump’s claim that McConnell has supported “trillions” in spending on Green New Deal projects is false even under a generous-to-Trump definition of what counts as a Green New Deal project. And as in the past, Trump failed to mention here that McConnell has been a vocal opponent of the Green New Deal congressional resolution as  a whole – and that Congress has never actually passed the resolution.

McConnell has repeatedly denounced the Green New Deal resolution, describing it as, among other things, “radical,” “socialist” and a “mess.”

So what is Trump talking about? Trump’s similar past attacks have been about how McConnell voted in 2021 for a $1.2 trillion bipartisan infrastructure bill that contained spending that overlaps with some of the proposals in the wide-ranging Green New Deal resolution. For example, the 2021 infrastructure bill contained tens of billions in spending on cleaning up toxic waste sites, modernizing public transportation, increasing the country’s resilience against climate change, ensuring drinking water is clean, and facilitating a transition to zero- and low-emissions vehicles.

But even if you were to count all of this as “Green New Deal” spending – which would be misleading given that the list includes priorities that both parties funded long before the Green New Deal was introduced in 2019 – the total would be in the hundreds of billions, not “trillions.”

McConnell opposed a major Democratic bill in 2022 that spent hundreds of billions more on climate initiatives.

Touting his performance on immigration policy, Trump claimed, as he has before, “I built 561 miles of wall.”

Facts First: Trump’s “561 miles” claim is false, a substantial exaggeration. An official report by US Customs and Border Protection, written two days after Trump left office and subsequently obtained by CNN’s Priscilla Alvarez, said the number built under Trump was 458 miles (including both wall built where no barriers had existed before and wall built to replace previous barriers).

Even in his campaign speeches late last year, Trump sometimes put the figure, more correctly, at “nearly 500 miles.” You can read more here.

CNN’s Andrew Kaczynski contributed to this report.

Politicians have never been known for a strict adherence to truth. U.S. voters admit they know their representatives routinely lie to them: voters routinely assume that even their own party’s politicians are dishonest about two fifths of the time, according to a 2021 study.But in this election year, a larger-than-life candidate is openly distorting reality and challenging fact on an unprecedented scale. Mendacity in the style of former president Donald Trump—and the uncritical repetition of such blatant lies—can measurably chip away at our ability to assess the plausibility of other, unrelated news stories, according to a new preprint analysis currently awaiting peer review.

Repeatedly viewing obviously outlandish claims makes people more likely to believe more ambiguous-seeming ones, the behavioral and cognitive scientists behind the new study conclude. The team’s results deal primarily with people’s beliefs rather than their ability to detect fake news (after all, something can be hard to believe yet still true). But the researchers also looked at how increases in perceptions of believability influenced people’s overall view of the truth.

Study co-author Reed Orchinik of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology says he wanted to examine our judgements of plausibility because he’s interested in how “the environment in which people encounter news affects the way that that news is interpreted.” He and his colleagues conducted five experiments with nearly 5,500 participants in all in which they asked these individuals toread or evaluate news headlines. Across all the experiments, participants exposed to blatantly false claims were more likely to believe unrelated, more ambiguous falsehoods.

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“The general idea is that you expose people to a stream of content that is either highly plausible or highly implausible,” Orchinik says. Some of the experiments used headlines made up by the researchers, while others were taken from a variety of news outlets. In one experiment, participants were asked to rate the believability of 60 hypothetical news headlines—drawn from 300 fictious entries that the researchers designed to have what they deemed low, moderate or high levels of implausibility. Another experiment took a similar approach but used real headlines fact-checked by Snopes.com. In the latter experiment, participants had to decide whether headlines were true or false (one such false headline, referring to the COVID-causing virus SARS-CoV-2: “U.K. Pathologist Warns Spike Proteins will Cause All Men to Lose their Reproductive Capacity”). The third and fourth experiments gave participants a long list of real headlines to simply read and then a short list of additional headlines that they had to judge as true or false. These tasks were designed to see whether passively reading headlines, as social media users might do in real life, influenced their perceptions. The fifth experiment sought readers’ opinions of the plausibility of true and false headlines shown at random.

In each experiment, some participants were exposed to lots of outlandish content: they saw implausible or false headlines between 58 and 80 percent of the time. And the participants who were shown more highly implausible headlines were more likely to believe ones that were less implausible. This effect was seen whether the participants self-identified as liberal or conservative. Also, as belief in plausibility rose, so did belief in truth. “Another takeaway from this paper is that if you see a lot of highly implausible things, plausible things are also viewed as more true,” whether they are or not, Orchinik says. Put simply: big lies make little lies more convincing.

The study’s survey methods are “sufficiently rigorous,” says Lynnette Hui Xian Ng, a misinformation and disinformation researcher at Carnegie Mellon University. She notes, however, that the respondents were all U.S. residents, and the results may not generalize to the rest of the world. Orchinik, for his part, points out that the implications of his paper (which he emphasizes has not yet gone through peer review) also depend on the volume of moderately implausible information that exists online.

“It’s really difficult to say what the effects of misinformation in the 2024 election are going to be and what the implications of my own research for that are,” Orchinik says. Others are already very worried. Trump, who recently locked in his Republican presidential candidacy, has a startling history of prevarication. (He made more than 30,000 false or misleading statements as president, according to a Washington Post analysis.) Years of research show that fake news travels faster and farther than real news on social media. Although such platforms play an important role in how the public receives political information, some social media scholars fear that the companies that run them are giving up their responsibility to arbitrate political content—just when that’s needed most. Technology conglomerate Meta, rather than emphasizing legitimate discourse, is simply deprioritizing political posts: it won’t use its algorithms to “proactively recommend content about politics” on Instagram and Threads, the company said in a February 9 statement. Meta also said it’ll begin a similar approach to political content on Facebook “at a later date.”

It’s not just Meta changing how it treats political subjects: CEO of SpaceX and Tesla Elon Musk said he bought X, formerly Twitter, to promote free speech—which meant, among other things, overturning Trump’s nearly two-year-long ban from the platform, which had been put in place after he allegedly incited violence at the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021.

Social networks have long tried to duck involvement in political debate because the companies behind them know that any intervention is likely to annoy at least half their audience. Intervention also opens them up to the risk of being defined under the law as a “publisher”—an entity that has some influence over (and thus responsibility for) content shared on its websites. This is legally distinct from a “platform,” which simply passes along other people’s posts—and thus avoids legal responsibility for their content. As Ng puts it, “Meta’s announcement of not recommending political posts might be because they do not want to be the arbiter of truth—to decide and fact-check what is real or fake news.” (Meta does have a third-party fact-checking program, but it does not review direct claims from politicians.)

Platforms that try to avoid promoting political content in their algorithms risk relegating it to areas at the fringes of their website, such as private Facebook groups. Users may also couch opinions or debate in doublespeak to get around the political filters imposed by platforms such as Meta. “Now that the platform will not recommend political posts, people will obfuscate political ideas behind seemingly harmless posts to beat the censors,” says Ng, who adds that this has parallels with the way Chinese social media users rely on nicknames such as “Winnie the Pooh” to refer to China’s president, Xi Jinping. “This makes detection of political posts harder in [the] future, and once people learn the methods, they will construct similar posts for other domains,” Ng says.

Other problems arise when social media platforms don’t steer users away from misinformation and toward legitimate political content. “This leaves the door wide open for bad actors to push outlandishly implausible fake news stories in order to try and manipulate our perception of the world around us,” says Steven Buckley, a lecturer in media and communication at City, University of London. He says the new preprint study is “solid,” but he does note that the concept of “plausibility” itself is subjective. The paper’s researchers borrowed the untrue headline “Staring at Hard Times, Tucker Carlson May Be Forced to Sell Bow-Tie Collection” from a satirical online publication as an example of highly implausible news. Whether you think that’s improbable, though, may depend on your perceptions of strapped-for-cash celebrities.

You might not be falling for false information right now. But the new research suggests that mere exposure to it can influence future beliefs. “One of the major harms of fake news is that it fractures our society so that people end up living in their own bubbles of reality,” Buckley says. “This is precisely what nefarious political actors want.”

While Orchinik was wary of elaborating on what these new findings mean for an election cycle featuring Trump, he was willing to come to one conclusion about the role of social networks: “I feel pretty comfortable, from the paper, saying that curbing extreme falsehood is going to be helpful,” he says.

Update (last updated 5/1/24): This article has been updated to include additional examples.

On April 15, former President Donald Trump walked into a Manhattan courtroom for the first day of his trial for charges of falsifying business records in order to conceal hush money payments to adult film star Stormy Daniels. Trump and right-wing media immediately began spreading lies about the trial. 

Right-wing media have wrongly claimed: that a gag order the judge issued on Trump is a violation of his freedom of speech, that the judge has barred Trump from attending his son’s graduation, that Trump should have been charged with misdemeanors rather than felonies, and that Trump should not be prosecuted because Hillary Clinton’s involvement in the Steele dossier is similar and yielded only a fine. 

In reality, the case centers on Trump’s attempts to conceal hush money payments to Daniels, who allegedly had an affair with the former president. Trump funneled the payments to Daniels through his former lawyer Michael Cohen, who was sentenced to three years in prison for his role in the scheme as well as other crimes. Prosecutors allege that Trump violated election law in paying off Daniels as it was part of a coordinated effort to assist his 2016 campaign and may have also violated state tax law by mischaracterizing Cohen’s reimbursement.

Experts say Merchan’s gag order is consistent with case law. Merchan also declined to answer Trump’s request to be excused from court on May 17 to attend his son’s graduation, stating that it was too early to make a decision but signaling an openness to it.