Was former U.S. Army Chief of Staff Gen. Randy George detained on suspicion of treason? No, that's not true: The claim was posted by a self-described parody website and it offered no supporting evidence of truth. The Pentagon did confirm on April 2, 2026, that Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth relieved George of his duties and asked him to retire, but…

Does an unaltered photo show the true height difference between Taylor Swift and Sabrina Carpenter? No, that's not true: The photo of Swift and Carpenter together in New York City has been digitally edited. The edit did not alter the size of either singer in the original photo but achieved the illusion by shifting Carpenter's position on the sidewalk. Originally…

Does a viral video of an inflatable Jesus doll floating in traffic capture a real-life event? No, that's not true: The clip was generated by AI. It was initially posted on social media by an account with a satire label. The claim appeared in a post (archived here) published by the @drhingram account on X on April 2, 2026, under…

Does a viral image actually show a U.S. Army helicopter that crashed in Iran on April 3, 2026? No, that's not true: The picture was online more than a year earlier. It was published in Honduras in March 2025. The claim appeared in a post (archived here and here) published by the @TheLaikYobaz account on X on April 3, 2026.…

Is this real footage of an American F-15 fighter jet being shot down by Iran? No, that's not true: The clip appears to come from a military simulation video game, and the same video was posted online about a month before the reported shootdown of a U.S. F-15 in Iran in early April 2026. An online AI detection tool estimated…

Did a $100 million lawsuit filed by Gavin Newsom against Nick Shirley, Willie Nelson and a dozen other celebrities collapse after whistleblower testimony? No, that's not true: The story that California's governor filed a defamation lawsuit against a long list of people who "publicly criticized state-level financial handling" was made up by a network of foreign-run Facebook pages and websites.…

Does a viral image of world leaders showing their middle fingers as an act of apparent disagreement with U.S. President Donald Trump show a real 2026 TIME Magazine cover? No, that's not true: The magazine's website did not contain such a cover. The image displayed shows signs strongly pointing to generative AI. The claim appeared in a post (archived here)…

Did Anthropic stage a leak of Claude's code as an April Fools' prank, an "exercise in controlled chaos"? No, that's not true: There was a leak of part of the source code for "Claude Code," Anthropic's AI-powered coding assistant. There is no evidence that the leak was intentional or timed to be an April Fools' joke as stated in a…

Does a real photo show that a bald eagle landed on top of the Artemis II rocket on the launch pad at Kennedy Space Center on April 1, 2026, just before liftoff? No, that's not true: The bird is an AI creation, about three times larger than a real bald eagle. Online AI image detection tools also found it to…

We agree with some very prominent people. Here's our proposal... Fact Checking Day on April 2, 2026 marks almost a year since Lead Stories published our last fact check as part of Meta's Third-Party Fact Checking Partnership. Since that day we've published over 1500 fact checks on our U.S. website on topics ranging from fake Epstein Files emails mentioning Elon…