The Whoppers of 2022
Summary
The midterm elections are finally over, but it won’t be long before the 2024 campaign cycle — which will really start in 2023 — gets going. Before that happens, we’ve put together this list of the year’s biggest whoppers that politicians and others made over the past 12 months.
Political appeals to fear were as popular as ever in 2022. Republicans sounded a false alarm about Democrats authorizing the IRS to target middle-income taxpayers with tens of thousands of new IRS “agents.” On the other side of the aisle, Democrats attempted to scare up votes by claiming that Republicans had a plan to “end” the Social Security and Medicare programs based on a proposal that few Republicans supported.
President Joe Biden earned mentions in our roundup for giving his policies too much credit for a significant reduction in the federal deficit — and for claiming to have rescued an economy “in decline.” Meanwhile, his predecessor, Donald Trump, a regular on our Whoppers lists, deflected from his own mishandling of classified White House documents by falsely alleging that other past presidents had done something comparable.
COVID-19 misinformation continued to be a huge problem online as well. One viral video advanced a conspiracy theory that the disease was caused by snake venom being injected into the public water supply, and another popular video promoted the equally bizarre claim that the COVID-19 vaccines are being used to depopulate the planet.
We also addressed misinformation about Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, including the statements of high-ranking Russian officials who denied for months that Russia was preparing to attack Ukraine. Then, after the attack had commenced, pro-Russia social media posts manufactured
