Walz to Walz fact-checking

This week:?Harris’ selection of Walz launches wave of biographical claims … What’s going on with Google, Meta AI results about Trump? … Trump’s Mostly False claim that Harris would confiscate all guns … False claims about Algerian boxer’s Olympic boxing eligibility

Harris chooses Walz, and fact-checkers head off to the races

It’s been another surprising and hectic week for journalists covering the 2024 election.

Vice President Kamala Harris selected Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz as her running mate Tuesday?and launched a campaign blitz across multiple battleground states to excite Democrats about the new Democratic presidential ticket. From the Republican side, former President Donald Trump and Sen. J.D. Vance, R-Ohio, offered countercommentary about Walz's record along the way.?

Before this week, PolitiFact had not fact-checked Walz on the Truth-O-Meter — so we had a lot to investigate, quickly, as claims about his background poured in.

Walz rose to the rank of command sergeant major over 24 years in the U.S. Army National Guard and worked as a teacher and football coach. He was elected to the U.S. House of Representatives in 2006, and has served as Minnesota governor since 2019.

Fact-checking 3 claims by Walz

At an Aug. 6 rally in Philadelphia, Harris and Walz appeared together for the first time as running mates. Walz repeated talking points by Harris and Democratic surrogates.

1. Walz said "violent crime was up under Donald Trump." It did rise in Trump's final year, 2020. However, the pandemic and the protests after George Floyd's murder, which happened in Walz’s home state, drove the spike, making it hard to assign blame to Trump’s policies. We rated his claim Half True .

2. Walz also said Trump will "gut Social Security." Despite some past comments expressing openness to cutting benefits or raising the retirement age, Trump has said consistently in the current election cycle that he won't do that. We previously rated a more measured claim by Harris Mostly False .

3. Walz challenged Vance to "get off his couch" and show up for a debate. Walz’s use of the word "couch" harks back to a fake social media claim about Vance that has received wide circulation. Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker earned a Pants on Fire for repeating the rumor.?

Send your fact-checking ideas to [email protected] .

Fact-checking 3 claims about Walz

As Harris considered Walz for the vice presidential slot, social media exploded with opposition research about Walz and his state, which is home to the largest Somali population in the U.S.

1. An Aug. 5 X post said Walz “just changed the Minnesota flag so it could resemble the Somalian flag."?

The Somalia national flag has a light-blue background with a five-pointed white star in the center. The new Minnesota state flag, adopted May 11, features a white, eight-pointed star on a dark blue background on the left, and light blue coloring on the right.

A lot of the misinformation is based on proposed Minnesota flag designs and not on the final design. Although both flags have stars and similar colors, as do many flags, Somalia’s flag did not serve as an inspiration for Minnesota’s, Andrew Prekker, a Minnesota man whose flag concept inspired the final design, told PolitiFact. And Walz played no role in the new flag’s design.

2. Trump told Minnesotans he “couldn’t get your governor to act” after the May 25, 2020, death of George Floyd. Floyd’s murder by police sparked protests, some peaceful and some violent.

"Every voter in Minnesota needs to know that when the violent mobs of anarchists and looters and Marxists came to burn down Minneapolis four years ago, remember me?" Trump said at his July 27 St. Cloud rally. "I couldn't get your governor to act. He's supposed to call in the National Guard or the Army and he didn't do it. I couldn't get your governor. So, I sent in the National Guard to save Minneapolis."

Walz’s decision to wait has faced criticism, but Trump’s claim is False . Walz called in the Minnesota National Guard after 4 p.m. CST on May 28, 2020. This happened about hours before Minneapolis police abandoned the department’s 3rd Precinct, which was overtaken and burned. At 10:30 p.m., May 28, Trump watched the scene on television and called Walz, offering to send in the military, WCCO-TV wrote.?

3. Trump’s supporters got the phrase “ladder factory” trending by spreading a clip from Walz’s July 30 interview with CNN.?

"Tim Walz wants to invest in a ‘ladder factory’ to help illegals scale the border wall," Trump War Room, an official Trump campaign account, wrote at 9:21 a.m. ET in an Aug. 6 X post.

"Radical Tim Walz wants a ‘ladder factory’ to help illegals get easy access into America," conservative commentator Benny Johnson wrote at 10:26 a.m. ET on X.

Their selectively edited video clip and commentaries omitted that Walz advocated other ways for stemming immigration at the southern U.S. border. Walz said he did not believe a wall to be a strong solution to the problem.

Here’s what Walz said, in context :

"He talks about this wall — I always say, let me know how high it is. If it’s 25 feet, then I’ll invest in the 30-foot-ladder factory," Walz said. "That’s not how you stop this," he said, referring to illegal immigration. "You stop this using electronics, you stop it using more border control agents, and you stop it by having a legal system that allows for that tradition of allowing folks to come here, just like my relatives did to come here, be able to work and establish the American dream."?

We'll be back tomorrow with our?report?on Walz’s military record.

— Reporting by Jeff Cercone, Madison Czopek, Louis Jacobson, Samantha Putterman and Amy Sherman

Fact-checks of the week (Mostly False edition)

As a refresher, our definition of Mostly False is the statement contains an element of truth but?ignores critical facts that would give a different impression.

• Medicare wars. Harris’ campaign stump speech warns voters about Trump’s plans for seniors’ health care and retirement benefits. "Donald Trump intends to cut Social Security and Medicare," she said in Atlanta on July 30. Harris’ Social Security line is Mostly False, and the Medicare point is, too . As president, Trump regularly proposed policies that would have reduced Medicare spending; policy experts disagree about whether Medicare beneficiaries would have borne the brunt of those cuts. But during the 2024 presidential campaign, Trump has consistently and repeatedly said he would not cut Medicare.?
• Exaggerating Harris’ gun buyback stance. Trump told his supporters that Harris will take away their guns. "She supports mandatory gun confiscation," Trump said Aug. 3 at an Atlanta rally. The phrase "gun confiscation" could lead voters to think that Harris wants to confiscate all guns from law-abiding owners. That’s not what she has said. While running in the 2019 presidential primary, Harris said, "I support a mandatory gun buyback program" for assault weapons. This would not cover all guns; handguns, for example, are the most popular. This position has changed. The Harris campaign told The New York Times that she supports banning assault weapons but not a requirement to sell them to the federal government. We rate Trump’s statement?Mostly False.
• People for people? After a historic prisoner swap Aug. 1 among the U.S., Russia and other countries, Trump questioned the details and compared it with deals he made during his presidency. “I got back many hostages, and gave the opposing Country NOTHING — and never any cash,” he wrote on Truth Social. But there were multiple times that Trump’s administration released prisoners held by the U.S. government in exchange for freeing Americans held abroad. In 2017, the Trump administration agreed to pay $2 million to North Korea for the release of U.S. college student Otto Warmbier, but a White House official said the money was never paid. We rate his claim Mostly False .?

Do Google and Meta AI-generated search results prove company bias? What we found

Are Google and Meta putting their Big Tech thumbs on the scale to tilt the election in Harris’ favor?

Social media users and supporters of Trump recently accused Google of manipulating search results and Meta’s artificial intelligence tool of hiding information about the attempted assassination against Trump.

"Big Tech is trying to interfere in the election AGAIN to help Kamala Harris," Donald Trump Jr., the former president’s son, wrote on X.

X owner Elon Musk, who has endorsed Trump for president, and conservative X account Libs of TikTok accused Google of obstructing meaningful search results for Trump and suppressing news about the July 13 shooting at Trump’s Butler, Pennsylvania, campaign rally.?

Some social media users also criticized Meta’s artificial intelligence tool, saying it wouldn’t give information about the assassination attempt or called it a "fictional event."

Trump attacked the tech companies July 30 on Truth Social, urging his supporters to "go after Meta and Google," accusing them of trying to rig the election. Trump also criticized Meta for flagging as misinformation a widely circulated photo of him raising his fist after a would-be assassin shot at him July 13. A Meta official said that was an error that has been fixed.

Google, in a lengthy July 30 thread posted on X, responded to complaints by acknowledging some bugs in its autofill feature. But the company said it is neither "censoring" nor "banning" particular search terms.

Meta also responded to problems involving its AI chatbot and said those problems were not "the result of bias."?

Experts told PolitiFact they don’t believe Google or Meta are intentionally favoring one candidate, but that they need to rebuild people’s trust in their platforms.

Tim Harper, a senior policy analyst of democracy and elections at the Center for Democracy and Technology, a Washington, D.C. think tank, said intentionally filtering information to favor one political candidate could result in "political blowback" that could damage their businesses.?

Experts also noted AI’s imperfections, saying that tech companies need to better warn users about its flaws.

It’s not just Meta’s AI giving out questionable answers. Five secretaries of state called on Musk to change the way X’s AI chatbot, Grok, works after it shared false claims about Vice President Kamala Harris’ eligibility for president and falsely said ballot deadlines in nine states had passed. As of Aug. 5, Musk had not publicly responded to the secretaries of states’ letter.

Read our full report .

— Jeff Cercone and Sara Swann

Our latest on Here & Now

PolitiFact is teaming with “Here & Now,” produced by NPR and WBUR in Boston and airing nationally, to bring fact-checks to radio. PolitiFact Managing Editor Lima Abdullah and Brandon Tensley, a national politics reporter for Capital B, a nonprofit newsroom focused on Black audiences, recently joined host Lisa Mullins to discuss false and inflammatory claims Trump made about Harris at the National Association of Black Journalists convention in Chicago.

The discussion covered Trump’s statement that Harris promoted her Indian heritage and then “turned Black” (she didn’t), Trump’s claim that he’s been “the best president for the Black population since Abraham Lincoln” and Trump’s effort to appeal to Black voters.?

Hear the full segment.

What to know about claims that Trump rally shooter used ‘encrypted’ messaging, bank accounts

During a July 18 Fox News appearance, Rep. Mike Waltz, R-Fla., linked the gunman, Thomas Matthew Crooks, and reports that U.S. intelligence had detected a plot by Iran to assassinate Trump.?

"The shooter had three encrypted accounts overseas at the same time we’re having an Iranian plot," Waltz said. Pressed on what he meant, Waltz said, "Well, we know that they were based in servers overseas."

Conservative activist and commentator Laura Loomer in a July 20 X post said something similar: "How does a 20-year-old nerdy kid have 3 encrypted overseas bank accounts? Who was sending him money overseas?"

Trump, too, cited encryption’s link to the shooting. He said July 22 on Fox News that Crooks "had some encrypted phone numbers and to foreign countries."

As of July 24, FBI Director Christopher Wray said it appeared that Crooks acted alone. And investigators have not said that Crooks had bank accounts overseas.?

PolitiFact’s reporting found that these remarks about the presence of "encryption" in Crooks’ activities reveal misconceptions about what encryption is and how commonly it factors in online applications and communications.

Encryption is a method of scrambling data so that only that data’s intended readers can make sense of it. Encryption is used widely.?

"Encryption is used daily by anyone using a cell phone, computer or the Internet," said Thomas Hyslip, a professor of instruction in criminology at the University of South Florida who formerly worked in federal law enforcement investigating cybercrime.?

"iMessage uses encryption, so all your messages are encrypted between the sender and receiver," he said, referring to a system Apple devices use. "If you go to a website that starts with ‘https,’ then your data is encrypted between your computer or phone and the webserver."

Experts said many communication applications or platforms use encryption in some capacity, including WhatsApp, Signal, Zoom and Telegram. Similarly, everyday banking applications such as Wells Fargo Mobile or Chase Mobile use encryption, as do platforms used to transfer money like Venmo, Apple Pay and PayPal, according to their websites.

"Privacy and security are now things that the consumer market expects and demands," said John Sammons, an associate director and professor at Marshall University’s Institute for Cyber Security.

Read on.

— Madison Czopek

Quick links to more fact-checks & reports

• Video spreads misinformation about people getting driver's licenses to vote in South Florida.?
• Claims about Algerian boxer Imane Khelif’s Olympic boxing eligibility lack context.
• Birth certificate doesn’t list Kamala Harris’ race, but that’s not proof she isn’t Black.
• Have incomes outpaced inflation since President Joe Biden took office? We investigate.
• Biden lifted sanctions on Venezuela. Is he to blame for the country’s disputed elections?

Do you smell smoke?

Here's your Pants on Fire fact-check of the week:?Biden’s order on voter registration tells federal agencies to follow laws, not break them.

See what else we've rated Pants on Fire this week.?

Have questions or ideas for our coverage? Send me an email at [email protected] .

Thanks for reading!

Katie Sanders

PolitiFact Editor-in-Chief