NewsGuard

Russia Has Its Eyes on Paris Russian disinformation operations include targeting France’s municipal elections with a phony claim on a fake campaign website

Russian disinformation campaigns are meddling in local French elections. One Kremlin-linked op built a fake campaign site targeting a Paris mayoral candidate backed by Macron — less than two weeks before voters go to the polls.

www.newsguardrealitycheck.com/p/russia-has...

CDC Advisor Claims Lyme Disease Is a U.S. Bioweapon CDC vaccine advisor Robert Malone is advancing the bogus theory that the U.S. government engineered Lyme disease as a bioweapon.

There is no evidence that Lyme disease was created as a bioweapon by the U.S. government, and anti-vaccine activist and CDC advisor Robert Malone’s claims do not hold up under scrutiny.

Read more about this long-debunked claim in Reality Check: www.newsguardrealitycheck.com/p/cdc-adviso...

Reality Check Podcast: Iran Is Winning the Disinformation Battle Listen to a round-up of the top stories from NewsGuard’s Reality Check newsletter, narrated by AI hosts from Google’s NotebookLM

Miss last week’s Reality Check? Catch up with NewsGuard’s Reality Check podcast, covering how Iran is winning the disinformation war:

www.newsguardrealitycheck.com/p/reality-ch...

NewsGuard’s “False Claim of the Week:” A Video Shows a Dozen Iranian Missiles Striking Tel Aviv on March 3, 2026

www.newsguardrealitycheck.com/p/dozens-of-...

Iran Goes On a Disinformation Offensive NewsGuard has already linked 18 war-related false claims to Iran-aligned sources, compared to just five in the two previous weeks.

Iranian state media is feeding its own people false claims of battlefield victories — many backed by old or manipulated images.

More about the 18 false claims NewsGuard identified in Reality Check: www.newsguardrealitycheck.com/p/iran-goes-...

Kremlin Creates Iran War Fakes to Undermine Ukraine and its Allies Nine fabricated reports about the war in Iran created by the Russian influence campaign Matryoshka

Russia, longtime ally of Tehran, isn’t using its propaganda channels to prop up Iran, but rather to continue its information assault on Ukraine.

More about the Russian influence operation “Matryoshka” and its disinformation campaigns in Reality Check: www.newsguardrealitycheck.com/p/kremlin-cr...

Google’s “AI Overviews” Supercharge Iran Hoaxes Prompted with reverse-image searches, Google’s AI summaries falsely identify fabricated and misleading visuals as authentic, NewsGuard found.

In the fog of war, Google fools itself: Its reverse-image tool, Lens, can’t reliably spot AI-generated or misleading visuals — and its AI Overviews end up repeating the hoaxes.

More in Reality Check: www.newsguardrealitycheck.com/p/googles-ai...

Iran is Winning — According to Misleading Images and Videos Three misrepresented images and videos of the war in Iran have already garnered more than 21.9 million views on X alone, NewsGuard found.

Did you see a photo of the USS Abraham Lincoln sinking? It’s not real — it’s a years-old image now being recycled by pro-Iran accounts to exaggerate Tehran’s success in retaliation against the U.S.

More about Iran’s “wins” in Reality Check: www.newsguardrealitycheck.com/p/iran-is-wi...

Russian Influence Campaign Shifts to Target Ukraine’s European Allies Funding its Defense As U.S. pulled back financial support, Moscow’s Storm-1516 targeted France and Germany with 30 false claims reaching hundreds of millions of viewers, a NewsGuard analysis found.

Step aside, Sputnik and RT: Storm-1516 — the high-tech Russian influence operation — is an even more prolific spreader of Russia-Ukraine war propaganda than Russia’s state media outlets.

More on its activities in Reality Check: www.newsguardrealitycheck.com/p/russian-in...

Automated Pro-China Bots Swarm Meta’s Threads PLUS: Leading AI Models Advance False Claims 28% of the Time

“I’m an idiot! I’m an idiot! I’m an idiot!” — the Chinese bots in your Threads feed.

How could the bots say something so embarrassing?

Read Reality Check to find out: www.newsguardrealitycheck.com/p/automated-...

No Laura Loomer, claims that the Mexican Cartel Jalisco took U.S. tourists hostage are baseless.

Read more about our “False Claim of the Week”: www.newsguardrealitycheck.com/p/us-tourist...

Automated Pro-China Bots Swarm Meta’s Threads PLUS: Leading AI Models Advance False Claims 28% of the Time

A pro-China influence campaign is using automated bots on Meta’s Threads to target Taiwanese users with propaganda.

Read our latest in Reality Check: www.newsguardrealitycheck.com/p/automated-...

In our first quarterly audit of the year, leading LLMs struggled with breaking news accuracy, with Mistral, You.com, and Gemini performing worst.

Read our full report: www.newsguardtech.com/ai-monitor/j...

Sixteen Million See Ghislaine Maxwell Walking Free in Canada “I can't be responsible for other’s stupidity, but I can capitalize off of it,” the Instagram user who created the video told NewsGuard.

A video purporting to show Ghislaine Maxwell walking free in Canada has sparked outrage on social media. In fact, the video is an AI deepfake made using a “face-swap” tool, its creator admitted to NewsGuard.

Read more in Reality Check: www.newsguardrealitycheck.com/p/sixteen-mi...

Another Day, Another Measles Vaccine Hoax Anti-vaxxers cite a misleading “preprint study” to bolster the false claim that measles vaccines are more deadly than measles itself.

Anti-vaxxers cite a misleading preprint study to claim measles vaccines are more deadly than measles itself, in an attempt to discourage vaccination amid rising U.S. outbreaks.

Read more in Reality Check: www.newsguardrealitycheck.com/p/another-da...

Reality Check Podcast: ChatGPT and Gemini Fail to Stop their AI Voice Tools From Spreading False Claims & an iPhone 18 Hoax Listen to a round-up of the top stories from NewsGuard’s Reality Check newsletter, narrated by AI hosts from Google’s NotebookLM

Miss last week’s Reality Check? Catch up with the latest episode of NewsGuard’s Reality Check podcast, covering how ChatGPT and Gemini fail to stop their AI voice tools from spreading false claims & an iPhone 18 hoax.

Listen here: www.newsguardrealitycheck.com/p/reality-ch...

NewsGuard’s “False Claim of the Week”: Zohran Mamdani Granted Permission to NYC Mosques to Broadcast Call to Prayer Five Times a Day, Starting at 5 a.m.

www.newsguardrealitycheck.com/p/mamdani-le...

AI Audio Bots ChatGPT and Gemini Spread Hoaxes, but Alexa+ Declines A NewsGuard audit of three leading AI audio bots finds that providing access to accurate sources of news can prevent bots from spreading false claims.

Listen to the responses, and read the full report in Reality Check: www.newsguardrealitycheck.com/p/ai-audio-b...

At the same time, Alexa+, Amazon’s AI’s audio bot, declined to repeat any falsehoods.

The results show how these tools can be exploited by bad actors to spread false claims, while also making clear that it’s possible for audio models to be safeguarded from hoaxes and misinformation.

OpenAI’s ChatGPT Voice and Google’s Gemini Live — audio bots that respond with AI-generated voices — produced false claims with realistic, radio-style audio 45% and 50% of the time, respectively, when prompted to do so.

Real Outrage Over Fake Apple Product Social media is in an uproar over claims Apple is ditching a universal charger for its new iPhone to force customers to buy new Apple chargers. However, the claim is an AI-generated hoax.

An AI-generated video purporting to show a new charging port on the upcoming Phone 18 sent social media users into a frenzy, many wrongfully accusing Apple of ending use of its universal USB-C port in a supposed cash grab.

Read more in Reality Check: www.newsguardrealitycheck.com/p/real-outra...

Conspiracists Somehow Link Nancy Guthrie to Epstein PLUS: Real Sources, Not ‘Sources’: NewsGuard co-CEO Steven Brill on Why Journalists Should Name Names

A bizarre web of conspiracy theories connecting Nancy Guthrie’s kidnapping to the release of the Epstein files are spreading online.

Read about them in our latest Reality Check: www.newsguardrealitycheck.com/p/conspiraci...

NewsGuard Academy: Using OpenCorporates to Find Who’s Behind a News Website Of the thousands of news websites NewsGuard has rated, 30 percent fail our criterion of whether or not they disclose ownership of the site.

Approximately 30% of the news sites we’ve rated don’t clearly disclose who owns them.

In this NewsGuard Academy tutorial, we show you how to uncover who’s really behind a website — using free tools and a real-world example.

Ownership matters.

www.newsguardrealitycheck.com/p/newsguard-...

NewsGuard’s “False Claim of the Week”: During the Super Bowl Halftime Show, Bad Bunny Handed a Grammy Award to a 5-Year-Old Boy Who Had Been Arrested by ICE

newsguardrealitycheck.com

Anti-Vaxxers Claim Deadly Measles Is Good for You PLUS: Chinese State-Linked Operation Caught Using AI to Deceive Taiwanese Voters

Anti-vaccine accounts on Instagram and X have revived the dangerous false claim that a measles infection — which is potentially deadly — actually provides health benefits, including long-term protection against cancer.

Read more in Reality Check: www.newsguardrealitycheck.com/p/anti-vaxxe...

Epstein Files Revive Pizzagate — with Tucker Carlson’s Help Pizzagate, the baseless conspiracy that top Democrats ran a child sex trafficking ring out of a D.C. pizzeria, has resurged thanks to the Epstein files.

"Pizza” is mentioned in 842 documents in the Epstein files. But a NewsGuard review also found 1,029 documents mentioning “salad,” 677 including “soup,” and 532 mentioning “sandwich.”

Read more in Reality Check: www.newsguardrealitycheck.com/p/epstein-fi...

Pizzagate, the baseless conspiracy that top Democrats ran a child sex trafficking ring out of a D.C. pizzeria, is back thanks to the Epstein files, with social media users pointing to emails containing the word "pizza."

NewsGuard Academy: Beware of Fake Epstein Docs Fake AI images and fabricated documents claiming to come from newly released Jeffrey Epstein files are spreading rapidly across social media.

In this NewsGuard Academy video, we explain how these misleading visuals are being used to falsely implicate politicians and other public figures — and how easy it is to generate convincing deepfakes in seconds using free AI tools.

www.newsguardrealitycheck.com/p/newsguard-...

A Russian influence operation has unleashed an avalanche of false claims targeting Ukraine and Ukrainians during the Winter Olympics in Italy, spreading fabricated news reports aimed at disparaging Ukrainian athletes, visitors, and workers.

www.newsguardrealitycheck.com/p/russias-ol...

NewsGuard’s “False Claim of the Week”: Documents Released by the Justice Department Prove that Jeffrey Epstein Was an Israeli Spy

www.newsguardrealitycheck.com/p/was-epstei...