NOT REAL NEWS: A look at what didn't happen this week
A roundup of some of the most popular but completely untrue stories and visuals of the week. None of these are legit, even though they were shared widely on social media. The Associated Press checked them out. Here are the facts:
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CLAIM: Nancy Pelosi is trying to pass a law called HR6666 which would allow people to come into your home and take your family members for quarantine.
THE FACTS: House bill 6666, the COVID-19 Testing, Reaching, And Contacting Everyone (TRACE) Act, clearly states that individuals who test positive during testing for COVID-19 would quarantine at their residences. Following the introduction of the bill May 1, social media users began misrepresenting components of the bill online. The text posts shared thousands of times across Facebook, Instagram and Twitter said that the bill would remove family members from households and force them to quarantine. “Nancy Pelosi is trying to pass a law called HR6666. If this passes, strangers can come into your house and take (by force if needed) your family members including your children to a quarantined area,” states one widely shared post on Facebook. In reality, the House bill would give $100 billion to local organizations, such as community health centers or nonprofits, to help with testing and contact tracing by funding door-to-door outreach, the purchase of testing supplies and the hiring and training of people to run mobile testing sites. Preference would be given to hot spots and medically underserved communities. The bill states that grants will be awarded for “diagnostic testing for COVID-19, to trace and monitor the contacts of infected individuals and to support the quarantine of such contacts, through mobile health units and as necessary, testing individuals and providing individuals with services related to testing and quarantine at...