15 August 2025 – The xenophobic movement has prevented migrants from entering health facilities. But the unconscious man in the photo, denied after-hours emergency care at a clinic, survived and is likely South African.
1 August 2025 – An unrelated photo was used to claim a woman had been getting child support from eight men for the same child for 12 years. But it’s just false clickbait.
22 July 2024 – New ways to make money on Twitter, now Elon Musk’s X, could be behind the otherwise inexplicable mislabelling of a dramatic video.
20 July 2024 – The person in the middle of the human tug of war is an Israeli West Bank settler, with Israeli police on one side and the settler’s comrades on the other. There is no Palestinian child to be seen.
11 July 2024 – The photo of a Ugandan military convoy was shot in the Democratic Republic of the Congo a year ago, not during Kenya’s recent youth-led tax protests.
8 July 2024 – The pic has prompted outrage on social media. But the women are simply student cadets at Kyiv university’s military institute, their heads bowed during a ceremony for fallen graduates.
20 June 2024 – The false claim echoes harmful stereotypes about Africa’s many countries, cultures and people. The video doesn’t show a “cultural practice” – it’s just people messing about at a festival.
20 June 2024 – Tornadoes are not uncommon in the east of South Africa. But the video does not show the powerful twister that devastated communities near Durban in June 2024.
17 June 2024 – South Africa has seen decades of xenophobic violence against people from elsewhere on the continent. But the video was shot in Haiti, and shows an attack on suspected members of powerful gangs.
5 June 2024 – The West African country’s new military government has ordered US forces out and welcomed Russian “military trainers”. But the photo is unrelated, taken four years ago during the Syrian civil war.
7 May 2024 – Photos of a student left dead in a gutter in Nigeria have been misused to score political points in Liberia.
3 May 2024 – The 2016 opening ceremony for Switzerland’s Gotthard railway tunnel has been described as more than odd. But it has nothing to do with Cern, the physics project that discovered the Higgs boson “god particle” and is hundreds of kilometres away.
9 April 2024 – When Cape Town’s Democratic Alliance government erected uncovered public toilets in 2009 it sparked outrage and a lawsuit. In 2024 a photo of one is being used for disinformation in the run-up to elections.
1 April 2024 – The viral video appeared online after a spate of school kidnappings by militants in northern Nigeria. But it shows a different conflict, in Cameroon.
12 March 2024 – The “Nigerian drug dealer” is one of many harmful stereotypes of migrants in South Africa. But the video was shot in the West African country of Liberia.
28 February 2024 – Western inaction against Rwanda for its role in the deadly M23 rebel conflict sparked protests in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Flags and tyres were burned, but no embassy was set on fire.
22 February 2024 – China’s policy of “mosque consolidation” has closed or demolished hundreds of mosques in Xinjiang province. But the video wasn’t shot there.
20 February 2024 – There was no violence after South Africa lost to Nigeria in their Africa Cup of Nations football semifinal, despite a controversial Nigerian embassy warning. Photos used to claim otherwise are from 2019.
16 February 2024 – The viral video was shot when Ousmane Sonko was facing trial, not after Macky Sall postponed Senegalese elections “indefinitely”.
14 February 2024 – It’s being used to claim that the new party is South Africa’s “biggest”, but the clip actually shows Fuerza del Pueblo supporters in the Dominican Republic.
8 February 2024 – Xenophobic posts mislabel a photo of a local oddity from Georgia – a train carriage converted into a river bridge – to sustain a harmful stereotype of Zimbabwe.
7 February 2024 – The myth of white genocide in South Africa continues to be sustained by false information. In this case, the Economic Freedom Fighters political party is blamed for an attack on a gay man on a different continent.
5 February 2024 – The woman stripped and beaten is not the Democratic Republic of the Congo’s elections commissioner. All she did was cast an unpopular vote.
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