In reviewing many of the some 3000 fact checks I have written or edited, there is a clear dividing line: June 2015, the month Donald Trump rode down the Trump Tower escalator and announced he was running for President.
“Businessman Donald Trump is a fact-checker’s dream ... and nightmare,” I wrote in the fact-check of his announcement speech. How little did I realise that would be true. Trump decreed that mainstream news organisations were “the enemy of the people”, undermining faith in traditional reporting, and insisted to his followers that he was the best source of information.
In ending its work with fact-checkers, Meta chief executive Mark Zuckerberg falsely claimed that fact-checkers censored free speech by being “too politically biased”, echoing Trump administration arguments. The Washington Post did not participate in the Meta programme, but any Facebook user had the option to opt out of having posts fact-checked. Many fact-checkers would liken their work to nutritional labels on snack foods – providing more information about online content. People are free to ignore the warnings, just as people can ignore nutritional labels.
Meanwhile, although the European Union enacted a law, the Digital Services Act, to ensure online platforms combat misinformation (such as by relying on fact-checkers), European fact-checkers are concerned that enforcement of the law could be weakened as part of trade negotiations with the Trump administration – which opposes such regulation.
Indeed, the Trump administration has also pressured Brazil to end its regulation of online platforms. The issue is sensitive in Brazil because the January 8, 2023 attack on the Brazilian Congress was inspired by clips spread across social media platforms of the January 6 attack on the US Capitol by Trump supporters one year earlier. Brazilian officials insisted they will not back down in the face of Trump’s threats, saying regulating social media platforms is a consumer safety issue, like driving laws. “Self-regulation has proven a failure,” Brazilian Supreme Court Justice Alexandre de Moraes said.
“Your freedom does not mean to be free to go the wrong way and crash into another car and kill another driver,” Cármen Lúcia, the president of Brazil’s Superior Electoral Court, told the fact-checking conference.
Before Trump entered politics, I found that many politicians spun or dissembled but most tried to keep their claims tethered to the truth. Our fact checks covered a range of topics, such as the accuracy of government statistics on students dying from alcohol or exaggerated claims about sex trafficking, which led lawmakers to stop using them.
President Barack Obama told the occasional whopper – “If you like your healthcare plan, you’ll be able to keep your healthcare plan” – but it was the rare politician, such as Minnesota Republican Representative Michelle Bachmann, who constantly spouted Pinocchio-laden nonsense. Obama’s Vice-President, Joe Biden, also had a reputation for mangling the truth: in 2011, Biden touted an Obama-era jobs bill by claiming the number of rapes in Flint, Michigan, had – depending on the hour of the day – doubled, tripled or even quadrupled because the number of police had been reduced. There was no evidence to support any of his statistics.
But Bachmann and Biden were outliers. In the 2012 presidential campaign between Obama and Mitt Romney, the former Republican Governor of Massachusetts, the two candidates were neck-and-neck in their average Pinocchio rating. Indeed, they had the lowest average number of Pinocchios of the major 2012 presidential candidates.
They also took fact checks seriously. Both candidates dropped talking points after a negative fact-check rating. An Obama administration official explained to me how, when faced with a choice of figures, the administration took the more modest number in hopes of avoiding Pinocchios. I heard from a campaign source that during debate prep, Obama, to his great annoyance, was told he couldn’t use a statistic because it had gotten Pinocchios. Obama’s campaign manager even sent a lengthy letter to the Post editor complaining that my Pinocchio ratings were undermining his attacks on Romney’s business record.
The expectation that politicians would stick close to the truth began to erode with Trump’s emergence. He claimed that thousands of Muslims in New Jersey had celebrated the 9/11 attacks – and doubled down even after my fact check proved this was a fantasy. He invented statistics – that the unemployment rate, then pegged at 4.9%, was really 42% – and kept repeating them, no matter how many times he was fact-checked.
In 2016, Trump’s opponents still cared about the facts. Florida Governor Jeb Bush’s campaign had a wall where they posted positive fact checks. Ohio Governor John Kasich dropped a talking point simply in response to my question for a possible fact check. Hillary Clinton’s staff worked hard to find policy experts to vouch for her statistics. (Her comments on her private email server were less defensible.)
But Trump didn’t care. He kept rising in the polls and eventually won the presidency. Other politicians took notice and followed his lead.
Besides Trump, something else changed the nature of truth in the mid-2010s: the rise of social media. The Fact Checker was launched in 2007, one year after the creation of Twitter and when Facebook had only 50 million users. By 2012, Facebook had 1 billion followers; it reached nearly 1.6 billion in 2015. Trump adroitly used Twitter – where he had 2.76 million followers at the start of 2015 – and other social media to spread his message. Trump’s call to ban Muslims from entering the United States was the most-talked-about moment on Facebook among the 2016 candidates in all of 2015, according to Facebook data.
Social media helped fuel the rise of Trump – and made it easier for false claims to circulate. Russian operatives in 2016 used fake accounts on social media to spread disinformation and create divisive content – tactics that led companies such as Meta to begin to use fact-checkers to identify misleading content. But the political forces that benefited from false information – such as Trump and his allies – led a backlash against such efforts, saying it was a form of censorship. Now tech companies are scaling back their efforts to combat misinformation.
In Trump’s second term, even venerable institutions such as the State Department – which I covered for nine years – spout falsehoods to attack efforts to combat disinformation. “In Europe, thousands are being convicted for the crime of criticising their own governments,” the department said in an X, formerly Twitter post on July 22. “This Orwellian message won’t fool the United States. Censorship is not freedom.” (The post was in response to a French Government post promoting the Digital Services Act.) When I asked the State Department for evidence of the claim that “thousands” had been convicted, the department twice asked for more time to respond – and then declined to comment.
Many on the left and right argue that fact-checking is merely another form of opinion journalism, disguised behind a veneer of objectivity. But research found that the three main American fact-checkers – The Fact Checker, PolitiFact and FactCheck.org – reached the same conclusion on similar statements at least 95% of the time. Of course, some might say this only shows we are all biased in the same way.
During Trump’s first term, The Fact Checker team documented that he made more than 30,000 false or misleading claims. Week after week, I would write fact checks unpacking his latest misstatements, and Trump generally earned Four Pinocchios – the rating for a whopper. But I sense that the country has gotten so used to Trump exaggerating the truth that it no longer seems surprising. I chose not to repeat the exercise in his second term.
Even as he racked up Pinocchios, Trump mentioned them almost 20 times during his first administration. He either complained about receiving Pinocchios or cited them when I awarded Pinocchios to one of his political foes, such as then California Representative Adam Schiff.
During the 2024 campaign, Trump sometimes mentioned Pinocchios, such as in a campaign stop in Waunakee, Wisconsin, in October. “I have to be very careful when I talk because the fake news, if I say something wrong, a little wrong, if I’m 3% off ... they’ll give me Pinocchios,” he told a rally. “You know the Pinocchio? The Washington Post, they give you Pinocchios. If you say something perfectly, they give you a Pinocchio.”
But since Trump took office for a second time in January, he hasn’t mentioned Pinocchios again. In an era where false claims are the norm, it’s much easier to ignore the fact-checkers.
