Analysis

ROME - That puff of white from atop the Sistine Chapel has long been a starting gun for conspiracists. With a new character in the story, they proclaim they alone tell the truth about dark forces playing pontifical puppeteers. These stories humans tell to make simple sense of complex events move ever faster, now that there's money to be made…

The conclave to elect Pope Francis' successor is set to start on Wednesday, May 7, 2025. It is a centuries-old ceremony entrenched in secrecy and powerful rituals, which strikes the world's imagination. This year, 135 cardinals from 71 countries across the five continents (of which Pope Francis has appointed 108, and 12 come from countries that never had a cardinal…

My first memory of the passing of a pope is a traumatic one: someone murdered him. Or at least, that's what everyone around me seemed to believe. I was just 13, but I had a sense that something was amiss: Albino Luciani had been Pope John Paul I for only 33 days, and he was relatively young, in his…

April 2 is International Fact-Checking Day, a global celebration of truth and accuracy. Like every year we want to take the opportunity to say that "Facts Matter". Usually at Lead Stories we are quite content to let the facts speak for themselves, but this year we have a much more eloquent guest speaker, world-famous actor Stephen Fry: Some of our…

It's that day of the year again! April Fools' Day is upon us. We're keeping a running list of the online jokes we spot this year. Seen one we missed? Email [email protected] and let us know! Flightradar24 Airplane tracking website Flightradar24 revived the supersonic Concorde aircraft and made one fly from London to New York, currently being tracked by over…

Show how much you truly love facts by supporting our fact checking work. Lead Stories was heavily affected by Meta's decision to end Third Party Fact Checking in the U.S. Unfortunately that meant letting go of a number of our writers and researchers but we plan to continue our work, providing up-to-the-minute fact checks about false information going viral. All…

Colorado Springs, Colo. - Lead Stories is proud to announce we won a $100,000 ENGAGE grant from the IFCN's Global Fact Check Fund for our project proposal to build a fact check labeling service on the Bluesky social network. The project will be open to all fact checkers who are verified signatories of the IFCN Code of Principles (register here…

Lead Stories was surprised and disappointed to first learn through media reports and a press release about the end of the Meta Third-Party Fact-Checking Partnership of which Lead Stories has been a part since 2019. On January 7, 2025, Joel Kaplan, the newly-appointed Chief Global Affairs Officer at Meta, announced in a press release that Meta will be ending the…

Is that another new logo in our website footer and sidebar? Yes, it is: We are pleased to announce Lead Stories is now a verified member of the European Fact-Checking Standards Network. We applied in May 2024 because of our work in Bulgaria, Hungary, Romania, Slovakia, Belarus and Ukraine. After a long and thorough assessment procedure, we were informed on…

What's that blue butterfly in the row of social media icons in the sidebar and footer of our website? Lead Stories is happy to announce we are now also present on the Bluesky social media network. Follow our accounts if you want to get immediate updates from our English, Spanish, Ukrainian, Russian, Slovak, Bulgarian, Hungarian or Romanian websites. Or follow…

If you spot something online that you think might be misinformation you can now report it directly through our WhatsApp tipline. Your tip will be forwarded to our reporters for further investigation but we will also automatically perform a search for you and see if we already have a fact check that might match with the claim in your tip.…

Each year on April 2nd, fact checkers around the globe celebrate International Fact-Checking Day to stress the importance of fact checking. Fact checkers add to the conversation by making accurate information available to everyone and by separating fact from fiction. Because healthy debate starts with having correct information and real examples available instead of bogus statistics and made-up stories. The…

If you have been following Lead Stories on TikTok, Instagram, WhatsApp or YouTube you may have already seen them, but now we're making it official. Lead Stories is proud to present "The Daily NOT," a show presented by robot hosts Artie Ficial and Botty McBotface. The Daily NOT is your daily video overview of all fact checks done by Lead…

Update: April Fools! Dozens of people tried registering their username, which shows there is a great need for facts on social media. Go here if you want to make your social media timeline a little more factual... Introducing: Fact/Line™ Lead Stories is proud to present Fact/Line™: a brand new social network based on facts and fact checking. Wouldn't it be…

If you love our fact checks you can now also get them delivered straight to your phone via our brand new WhatsApp channel. If you follow us you won't just be getting a link and a headline each time we publish one but also a short video summary (with captions so you can watch without sound). At the end of…

Mike & Dennis At Lead Stories we have a long history of looking at Mike Lindell's election fraud claims. Readers will remember our fact checks about Lindell's four conspiracy-filled election fraud "documentaries" here, here, here and here, or our coverage of his Cyber Symposium here. We also warned him about Dennis Montgomery, a man with a long history of providing…

So you've probably read all those warnings from pundits, academics and researchers about how generative AI tools like ChatGPT are going to impact disinformation and fact checking. And you may have even seen some recent examples of a deep-faked pope in a puffer jacket or Donald Trump being arrested. But let me tell you the story of a real-life example…

As you could tell by the date, this was an April Fools' joke and we didn't really launch a mad conspiracy-spewing AI bot. Hope you enjoyed it! Colorado Springs - Award-winning fact checking organization Lead Stories is proud to announce the launch of FactGPT, the world's first AI-powered fact checking chatbot. Combining the power of Lead Stories' database of existing…

This article lays out the evidence Alan Gray (CEO of alternative news site NewsBlaze) is quite likely the key person behind the anonymously published website named Real Science hosted on the domain name goodsciencing.com. It was recently in the news because it was the source for some spectacular (but wrong) statistics about athletes suffering cardiac arrests (here's our fact…

The year is almost over, so it is good to look back. First, the numbers, as of December 15, 2022. This year we have published 1,555 fact checks in English (so far ...) 283 fact checks about COVID misinformation; 244 debunks of Russian propaganda and false claims about the invasion of Ukraine; 140 debunks of false claims about election fraud,…