The claim that the small African country of Uganda has discovered 31 million tonnes of gold ore with a yield of 320,000 tonnes of refined gold is going viral. But its numbers are, simply, impossible.
7 August 2025 – Alex Jones posted an old video of a historic crisis with the suggestion it was a typical day in South Africa – and “the future of ALL Western countries if changes are not made fast”.
22 July 2024 – John Hlophe, the uMkhonto weSizwe Party’s parliamentary leader, said state ownership of land in South Africa would be no different from England, where “all land belongs to the queen”. He’s wrong, and not just about the late queen.
18 July 2024 – Russell Brand’s guest David Martin makes stuff up from a document he may not have read. If the WHO is a “criminal cartel”, all other UN agencies – the International Seabed Authority, for example – are too.
18 July 2024 – Social media users have reacted angrily to an X post that suggests Alan Winde, the Democratic Alliance premier of the Western Cape, is a “new world order globalist”. But the post is just a clumsy parody.
15 July 2024 – Some 500,000 noncitizen spouses and 50,000 noncitizen children are likely to benefit from the scheme, not 1 million. And they may only apply for permanent residence, not citizenship.
14 July 2024 – “They are feeding the black people the maggots,” the InfoWars founder said as he improvised another false claim. But Gates had nothing to do with EntoMilk, an unsurprisingly discontinued ice cream made from fly larvae.
5 July 2024 – Nomsa Masuku, one of South Africa’s four electoral commissioners, was arrested for fraud allegedly committed while she headed a charity a decade ago. The arrest, just weeks after the elections, had nothing to do with false claims of vote fraud.
3 July 2024 – A Wikipedia edit changed Leon Schreiber’s nationality just 12 minutes after president Cyril Ramaphosa’s unity cabinet appointments were due to be announced. For the previous four years, the page had correctly put the new Home Affairs minister’s birthplace in South Africa.
23 June 2024 – The absurd and harmful claim has met approval from social media users across the world.
24 June 2024 – Net zero policies apply to greenhouse gases that trap heat in the atmosphere. Sulphur dioxide is not a greenhouse gas.
23 June 2024 – The false claim tries shift blame for the centuries-long transatlantic slave trade.
21 June 2024 – It’s soggy old health advice, circulating online in several languages for years. And it remains false.
20 June 2024 – A legal migrant from Zimbabwe was awarded R17 million in damages after a court found South Africa’s health department “100% responsible” for her child’s severe disability. She is not the woman in the photo, shot nowhere near South Africa.
18 June 2024 – False claims of election rigging are on the uptick across the world, from Nigeria and Brazil to Slovakia and, notoriously, the United States. These claims undermine democracy and people’s faith in their governments.
11 June 2024 – The distressing video of two bloodied women being beaten up and sexually assaulted was shot on a road near Kampala. There’s no evidence that anyone involved was South African or Nigerian.
21 May 2024 – The agreement to better prepare the world for future pandemics is a new target of conspiracy theorists. But it’s yet to be finalised, so South Africa couldn’t have signed it.
21 May 2024 – Pharma giant AstraZeneca has acknowledged the rare side effect of its coronavirus vaccine for years. The drug has now been withdrawn simply because it can’t compete with newer and better alternatives.
20 May 2024 – The man with a noose around his neck is not Hamza Bendelladj, as fact-checkers have pointed out for years. The hacker is alive and serving his sentence in a US prison for selling malware that caused major financial harm not only to institutions, but to individual people.
20 May 2024 – Russia’s visa policy for Africa is more relaxed than those of the US and EU. But most African countries still need some kind of visa for travel to Russia.
17 May 2024 – The treaty is conspiracy theorists’ new bugaboo. But there’s been no public backlash and the voluntary agreement – still being hammered out by World Health Organization member states – hasn’t been abandoned.
14 May 2014 – The viral graphic gets a lot wrong. The photo on the left shows Serena Williams, not Venus. The photo on the right shows French tennis champ Amelie Mauresmo, who is not trans. And there’s been no credible report of the match.
10 May 2024 – All the video shows is a small contingent of Angolan cadets, students at a military institute in southern Russia, marching in a parade competition. They won the audience award – but didn’t join the Russian army.
5 May 2024 – False claims about the size and changing fortunes of African airlines have been circulating online for years. The privately owned Air Peace is doing well, but it’s not Africa’s largest.
26 April 2024 – Anti-migrant sentiment is a hot campaign issue, but the video only shows Mozambique’s electoral commission registering citizens living in South Africa to vote in their own upcoming elections.
22 April 2024 – Any claim to “cure” HIV is false. A new social media scam targeting HIV-positive people in Zambia latches onto Crispr gene editing technology, used in an exciting experiment in the search for a possible cure – but not the actual cure.
22 April 2024 – Suggesting a third world war, the claim first appeared soon after Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022. But the doom merchants were just making stuff up.
21 April 2024 – The false claim that “tonight” the Earth will “face its highest radiation” has been circulating online for well over a decade. It’s been given new life by the April 2024 total solar eclipse over Mexico, the US and Canada.
17 April 2024 – People can still get an mRNA coronavirus vaccine in Japan – they just have to pay for it. And the country’s ageing population has nothing to do with the jab.
8 April 2024 – Vladimir Putin hasn’t said anything about Jesus’s skin colour. And the false claim ignores the art of many Christian traditions – including Africa’s ancient Ethiopian church.
22 March 2024 – The World Economic Forum is often the subject of fearmongering fictions by conspiracy theorists. One example from The People’s Voice exploits worries about artificial intelligence.
12 March 2024 – The conspiracist website Real Raw News makes up false stories about public figures it dislikes being executed at the US naval base in Guantanamo Bay. Its latest subject is the World Health Organization’s Dr Chikwe Ihekweazu.
5 March 2024 – A old online rumour that if a registered voter doesn’t turn up at the polls their vote “automatically” goes to the ruling ANC has resurfaced in another election year. But while a good voter turnout makes a better democracy, no democracy works that way.
29 February 2024 – The TikTok clip completely makes up the quote, using an edited and out of context video of Benjamin Netanyahu giving a speech in Uganda in 2016.
21 February 2024 – The People’s Voice website has made up another lie, that Microsoft plans to shut down computers used to post disinformation – the site’s speciality.
12 February 2024 – “Disease X” is simply a placeholder name for a possible future pandemic, used in planning a response to such an outbreak. Conspiracy theorists have hijacked the name to spread their special brand of fear.
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