CheckMate is a weekly newsletter from RMIT FactLab that draws on the work of its sister organisation, RMIT ABC Fact Check, to recap the latest in the world of fact checking and misinformation.
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CheckMate December 9, 2022
This week, CheckMate investigates a social media post circulated by the Young Liberals that uses the WWF Australia's research selectively.
We also round up the wildest claims from the FIFA World Cup so far and debunk a viral claim that Iran recently sentenced 15,000 protesters to death.
Young Libs misappropriate WWF branding to points-score on renewables
A "renewable superpower scorecard" posted online by the Liberal Party's official youth wing, the Young Liberals, has been adapted from WWF Australia and reworked to remove crucial context and add partisan spin, CheckMate has found.
Published to Facebook, Twitter and Instagram, the graphic claims that New South Wales and Tasmania are "leading the nation" when it comes to being a "renewable superpower" — with the image highlighting that both are Liberal-run states.
"Scoring [was] undertaken independently by WWF," reads a footnote below a table stamped with the environmental organisation's logo.
But while the Young Liberals' scorecard is indeed based on a post by the WWF, it omits key details that appear in the original.
These omissions include the federal government's score, and the change in points awarded to each jurisdiction since the last scorecard report.
Meanwhile, the graphic adds political party logos and photos of state premiers in order to suggest Liberal governments have led the charge on renewable energy policies.
The WWF's scores are based on its in-depth Renewable Superpower Scorecard report, which ranks Australia's states and territories on their progress towards "switching Australia's domestic energy system to renewables" and also on "how quickly they are working to establish new renewable export industries for the nation".
Marked out of a potential 110 points, scores reflect progress across 11 broad areas, with the aim "to celebrate success and encourage greater ambition".
In the group's post, the Young Liberals correctly note that NSW (71 points) and Tasmania (69 points) took out first and second place in 2022, while Queensland and South Australia tied for third (64 points).
However, they exclude the improvements made across all jurisdictions since the previous report, which feature prominently in the WWF scorecard.
Indeed, the federal government placed fourth with a score of 59 points. That was up from just 33 points in 2021, when it limped into last place under the Liberal-National Coalition.
According to the WWF report, "the Australian federal government has made the biggest leap of all (+26 points), driven by a raft of policy and budget commitments since the 2022 election" (in other words, changes made since Labor came to power).
Scorecards are only available back to March 2021, though the largest non-national increases since then have been in NSW (28 points) followed by the Labor states of Queensland (26 points), Western Australia and Victoria (both 16 points).
In an email to CheckMate, a spokesman for the environmental group said the Young Liberals' scorecard "was not authorised by WWF-Australia, nor was the use of our logo".
He added that the organisation was a "non-partisan, science-based organisation", and that its rankings were "not intended to promote any political party or politician".
"As noted in the full scorecard report, there is still more work for all governments to do."
Fact checkers blow the whistle on World Cup whoppers
While fans have been preoccupied cheering on the Socceroos in their ultimately unsuccessful World Cup run, fact checkers around the world have been kept busy debunking a slew of FIFA-related furphies.
USA Today, for instance, found that there was no evidence that Saudi Arabia's players were each given a Rolls Royce worth half a million dollars after the team's defeat of Argentina.
According to the fact checkers, Saudi Arabia's head coach and one of its players had also both denied the suggestion that the team was arriving home to the luxury cars.
Meanwhile, after a report of the Japanese national team leaving their locker room remarkably spotless went viral, both the team and its supporters became the target of pranksters and satirists.
As Indian fact checkers at the Quint found, a number of photos apparently showing Japan's very messy locker room after its 1-0 loss to Costa Rica were actually taken in March in the Italian team's locker room following their loss to North Macedonia.
NewsMobile, another fact-checking organisation based in India, similarly found that footage appearing to show Japanese supporters taking rubbish out of bags and dumping it inside a stadium had been reversed. The original video actually showed the fans cleaning up.
In another instance of manipulated video footage, US fact checkers at Verify debunked a claim that Chinese media had blurred spectators in the stands in Qatar in order to prevent Chinese citizens from knowing that other countries do not require masks to be worn.
"In an analysis of several of [China's] state-run media outlets, VERIFY found the networks or publications did not blur the crowds in their coverage of the World Cup," the site explained.
Nevertheless, the New York Times and the Guardian reported, it did appear that Chinese state media avoided broadcasting some crowd shots, instead cutting to alternatives such as live footage showing the teams' coaches.
Finally, US fact-checking outlet PolitiFact rubbished suggestions that Qatar forced the German team's jet to turn back to Oman because it featured a slogan reading "Diversity Wins".
According to the fact checkers, the Germans flew to Oman on the plane carrying the slogan but took a second regional flight on a different plane to Qatar for environmental reasons.
No, Iran has not sentenced 15,000 protesters to death
A claim that 15,000 Iranian protesters have been sentenced to death has continued to circulate online, despite numerous fact checkers finding it to be incorrect.
The claim, which was shared on Twitter in November by Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, alleges that the Iranian government had decided to impose the death penalty on nearly 15,000 protesters.
"These brave Iranians were fighting for their human rights," Mr Trudeau wrote in the since-deleted tweet, "and we continue to stand united in support of them, and united against the regime's heinous actions."
As the BBC's Reality Check found, however, while more than 15,000 protesters were estimated to have been arrested in Iran, only five had been sentenced to death, with another 20 facing charges punishable by death.
Mr Trudeau's office told the BBC the post was "informed by initial reporting that was incomplete and lacked necessary context" and that the tweet had been deleted.
The claim has also been debunked by Snopes, Full Fact, Al Jazeera, Reuters and PolitiFact.
The protests in Iran, which have been met with a brutal backlash from the government, were sparked by the death of Masha Amini, who was arrested by the morality police for allegedly violating laws requiring women to cover their hair with a hijab.
Edited by Ellen McCutchan and David Campbell
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