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.
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.
24 June 2024 – Net zero policies apply to greenhouse gases that trap heat in the atmosphere. Sulphur dioxide is not a greenhouse gas.
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 The drug has now been withdrawn simply because it can’t compete with newer and better alternatives.
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.
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.
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.
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.
20 March 2024 – The image is not proof that Israeli and US intelligence agencies created the Islamist group. The original photo shows the soldiers holding a green and yellow flag – not the black and white flag of Isis.
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.
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.
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.
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