An illustration of a young Abraham Lincoln (AP)

Everyone is talking about “fake news” these days, but there’s a lot of disagreement about what legitimately qualifies as such. The chief reason for this quarrel: Social media allows for the easy dissemination of false reports, and people tend to seek out information that supports their world view.

Here we highlight 15 falsehoods that are widely passed around in alt-right and related social-media circles. Each spurious statement comes from a blog, social-media post or reader comment on a news report.

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The Associated Press

'Abraham Lincoln was a slave owner. Guess we need to take down the Lincoln Memorial and get rid of all our pennies and $5 bills!'

The 16th president never owned slaves, but the notion is so common that history professor Gerald J. Prokopowicz wrote a book titled, "Did Lincoln Own Slaves? And Other Frequently Asked Questions about Abraham Lincoln." Why is the misconception so widespread? "Some critics look at [Lincoln's] careful and politically practical approach to ending slavery and mistake it for reluctance to help African-Americans," Prokopowicz told the Chicago Tribune in 2008. "Others overlook slavery altogether and romanticize the Confederacy as a libertarian paradise crushed by the tyrant Lincoln. But since even Lincoln's most extreme opponents can't deny that the end of slavery was a good thing, they have to try to disassociate Lincoln from emancipation, and that leads to the absurdity of implying that Lincoln must have been a slave owner."

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The Associated Press

'Just for the record, Confederate soldiers, sailors and marines in the Civil War were made U.S. veterans by an act of Congress in 1957'

That statement, which is frequently shared on Facebook, continues: "In essence, when you remove a Confederate statue, monument or headstone, you are in fact removing a statue, monument or headstone of a United States veteran." For the real record, Congress has never passed a law that turned Confederate soldiers, sailors and marines into U.S. veterans. The Southern rebels, remember, rejected the United States and took up arms against it. The 1950s law the social-media meme cites chiefly addressed pension rights for the widows of war veterans. It "does not do what Confederate apologists say it does," the Institute for Southern Studies' online magazine wrote in 2015. Added Andy Hall on the academic-history site Crossroads: "If you're referring to the 1958 legislation, all it did was make Confederate veterans eligible for the same VA benefits as Union soldiers were. It did not make them U.S. veterans, make any other official change in their status, or extend any particular protections to graves or monuments."

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Nazis were socialist. https://t.co/WTmYzfxlKi — Ian Miles Cheong (@stillgray) August 17, 2017

'Nazis were socialists'

It's easy to see why some people get confused about this. After all, the word is right there when you unwind the abbreviation: National Socialist German Workers' Party. The British newspaper The Independent recently cleared things up for readers: "The fact that the far-right party contained 'socialist' in the name was a rebranding gambit to draw workers away from communism and into populist nationalism." History blogger Mike Stuchbery pointed out on Twitter that the name National Socialist German Workers' Party was "a total misnomer. It's like the World Series, or Democratic People's Republic of Korea, or 'ethics in gaming journalism.' The Nazis were fascists. Indisputably. They drew their ideology from Italy's fascists, who arose in reaction to the Left." Historian and former National Security Agency analyst John Schindler is incredulous that the "Nazis were socialists" misperception has gained a foothold. "Fascism was not a movement of the Left," he tweeted this month. "Why is this complicated?" He then added, with a wink: "Corollary: You only get to call Fascists Leftists if you fully embrace pre-1789 ancien regime values."

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Study what General Pershing of the United States did to terrorists when caught. There was no more Radical Islamic Terror for 35 years! — Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) August 17, 2017

'U.S. Gen. John Pershing executed Muslim insurgents with bullets dipped in pig's blood'

This is one of President Donald Trump's favorite myths. Gen. Pershing is best known as the commander of U.S. forces during World War I. His long service to his country also included a posting in the Philippines in the early 1900s when the Pacific islands were a newly acquired U.S. colony. Trump has repeatedly claimed that Pershing used bullets soaked in pigs' blood to scare and repulse Muslim insurgents there, since Muslims believe consuming pork is a sin. Pershing, Trump claimed during the 2016 campaign, "took 50 terrorists and he took 50 men and dipped 50 bullets in pig's blood. ... And he has his men load up their rifles and he lined up the 50 people, and they shot 49 of those people. And the 50th person, he said, you go back to your people and you tell them what happened." Reported Time magazine after Trump first offered up this history lesson: "It's a gruesome story, and it is also not true." Texas A&M history professor Brian McAllister Linn said he and his colleagues had "found no evidence to support this. We also concluded it was out of character."

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The Associated Press

'Trump won 3,084 (counties). Clinton won 57'

This was offered up by the website TruthFeed shortly after the 2016 election and quickly went viral in certain social-media circles. And it's a ways off, though Trump did triumph in far more counties than his opponent. Hillary Clinton won 487 counties nationwide, compared with 2,626 for Trump, The Associated Press reported in December 2016. This disparity showcases how Clinton's stronghold was urban America while the GOP nominee dominated in rural counties. Trump ended up with 304 electoral-college votes to 227 for Clinton, resulting in Trump's election as president. Another common misconception among Republicans is that Trump won the popular vote. In fact, Clinton won it with 48.2 percent of the vote to Trump's 46.1 percent. Clinton ran up huge victories in heavily populated Democratic states like California, while Trump swept the key Midwest "swing states" by razor-thin margins.

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Trump: What Statues are Next? Martin Luther King Jr? How Far Will the Left Go? pic.twitter.com/AEZRvIeM4h — Kevin W (@kwilli1046) August 16, 2017

'Martin Luther King Jr. was against gay marriage. Should we take his statue down?'

Former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee, in opposing the U.S. Supreme Court's 2015 ruling in favor of gay marriage, referenced Martin Luther King Jr.'s 1963 "Letter from Birmingham Jail," in which the civil-rights leader explained his non-violent approach to opposing systemic racism. "In his brilliant essay, the letters from a Birmingham jail, he reminded us, based on what St. Augustine said, that an unjust law is no law at all," Huckabee said. "And I do think that we're going to see a lot of pastors who will have to make this tough decision." Huckabee's remarks led to other gay-marriage opponents referencing King when talking about the issue. The fact is, we don't know how King would have addressed gay marriage had he lived to see it become a mainstream political issue. But the Daily Beast pointed out that "the basic premise of equating King's fight against segregation with moral objections to same-sex marriage doesn't ring true to King's broader message of inclusion, tolerance and the rights of minorities to live by the laws of the majority."

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The Associated Press

'George W. Bush is a secret liberal'

During his time in the Oval Office, "Dubya" was almost universally considered a conservative. The Republican president tried to privatize Social Security, after all, and many progressives painted him as a mindless free-enterprise avatar and a dangerous war monger. That said, the growing notion that the 43rd president is a secret liberal might not be entirely off-base -- if, that is, you take into account how dramatically President Trump has obliterated conventional ideological norms. Noted National Review in March: "Conservatives who once fiercely defended Bush are now looking askance at him while worshiping at the altar of Trump." Earlier this year Bush burnished his "secret liberal" credentials among those Trump worshippers by declaring the mainstream media "indispensable to democracy." Then there was his memorable reaction to Trump's Inauguration speech: "That was some weird sh--."

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Snopes.com

'Antifa flyers call for the murder of white children'

"The white racist and their Heeb masters must be purged from the face of the earth," the flyer from the "National Antifa Front" states. Photos of the inflammatory handbills have been making the social-media rounds since April. But no anti-fascist activist group is responsible for them. Indeed, the National Antifa Front doesn't exist. "This flyer was not created by antifa," Snopes stated. One dead giveaway that the flyers are phony is their anti-Semitic language, which is anathema to antifa outfits. New York City Antifa, one of many loosely run hard-left organizations that have jumped into the spotlight thanks to its aggressive opposition to Donald Trump's presidency, called the flyers "fake as a three-dollar bill -- but there's a sucker born every minute."

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The Associated Press

'DNC staffer gave stolen emails to WikiLeaks, then Hillary Clinton had him murdered'

Sean Hannity (pictured), known to readers of conservative columnist Bret Stephens as "Fox News' dumbest anchor," pushed this conspiracy theory hard for weeks. And he apparently convinced former GOP Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich. "We have this very strange story now," Gingrich said in May, "of this young man who worked for the Democratic National Committee, who apparently was assassinated at four in the morning, having given WikiLeaks something like 53,000 emails and 17,000 attachments." The DNC staffer was 27-year-old Seth Rich, and he was shot to death in Washington, D.C., last year while on his way home from work. There is absolutely no evidence that he had anything to do with Hillary Clinton's hacked emails making their way to WikiLeaks. Police believe his murder was a "botched robbery attempt," not a vast political conspiracy.

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The Associated Press

'I give you George Soros. A SS in the National Socialist German workers party. Nazi party'

The accusation, which started to spread on the internet in 2016, continues: "He served under Adolf Hitler and Heinrich Himmler. He said it was the best time of his life." Soros, the Hungarian-born billionaire and high-profile supporter of progressive causes, was never a Nazi. Here's Snopes' response: "As hoaxes go, this one was neither plausible nor hard to disprove. ... Soros grew to adolescence as a persecuted Jew in Nazi-occupied Budapest." Such outrageous attacks on Soros are nothing new. In 2010, conservative commentator Glenn Beck accused Soros of helping send Hungarian Jews to the Nazi death camps during World War II. Soros's own account, however, indicates he played a small part in warning his fellow Jews. He told the writer Michael Lewis that, when the Nazis occupied Hungary in 1944, they tasked "little kids" -- Soros included -- with handing out deportation notices. "I was given this list of names," he said. "I took this piece of paper to my father. He instantly recognized it. This was a list of Hungarian Jewish lawyers. He said, 'You deliver the slips of paper and tell the people that if they report they will be deported.'"

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The Associated Press

'Obama spent more time on vacation than any other president'

How much time presidents spend on vacation is a common thread on social media. Regardless of their political affiliation, Americans tend to believe presidents take too much time off. During his time in office, President Barack Obama faced relentless criticism from The Blaze, Fox News and other conservative media outlets about his vacations. Last September Politifact compared Obama's time off while commander in chief with his that of his predecessor, George W. Bush: "Obama has been on 28 vacations (including long weekends) spanning all or part of 217 days. The president has just over four months left in his term. His predecessor, Bush, made 77 visits to his Texas ranch spanning all or part of 490 days." If he keeps up his present pace, President Donald Trump will out-vacation both Obama and Bush. The Independent this month reported that "by the end of August, [Donald Trump] will have taken 53 days of leisure," adding that Trump "has now enjoyed more than three times as many holiday days as his predecessor had enjoyed at the same stage in his tenure."

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The Associated Press

'Nearly all recent global warming is fabricated'

Some conservatives believe human-caused climate change isn't happening, that it's nothing but a left-wing conspiracy. President Trump has stated he doubts the legitimacy of climate science, and he has pulled the U.S. out of the Paris climate accord. In July, Breitbart News, one of the president's favorite news sources, reported that academic studies showing a warming Earth have been "fabricated by climate scientists." Rumors researcher Snopes.com debunked the article. "Using the apparently revelatory finding that the addition of more or higher quality data to a record can change and improve it over time," Breitbart concludes that in mainstream climate research "past temperatures are intentionally and nefariously biased to be cooler, while recent temperatures are biased to be warmer." Snopes wrote: "Considering the most significant adjustment to the data actually increases early 20th century temperatures without doing the same to the post-1950 data, this argument would be a nearly impossible one to make if burdened by facts."

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'Political correctness in Europe protects Muslim rape culture'

This one also comes from Breitbart, which reported that a rape "epidemic" is sweeping Europe and that Muslim rapists were being protected by politically correct activists. Sexual assault of women is a significant problem in the Muslim world, as it is in the West. About two-thirds of women in Morocco, for example, report having experienced "physical, psychological, sexual or economic abuse." But claims that Muslim immigrants have caused a "rape epidemic" in Europe are dubious, to say the least. Wrote The Guardian earlier this year: "Based on an unsubstantiated claim that there is indeed a 'rape epidemic,' the [Breitbart] piece states that 'the epidemic is a byproduct of the influx into Europe of a million, mostly Muslim, migrants,' arguing that: 'It's just not politically correct to talk openly about Islam's rape culture' and that 'like honor killings, with massive Muslim immigration on the horizon, it could be coming to a town near you all too soon.' In stark contrast to the website's regular downplaying of 'the radical feminist rape-culture panic' -- despite research suggesting that 23% of female undergraduate students in the U.S. have reported experiencing sexual assault since enrolling in college -- the portrayal of Muslims as not just culturally different but also a physical and sexual threat (a traditional tactic of the anti-immigrant far right) is commonplace on Breitbart." During the 2016 presidential election, Trump said political correctness "is the big problem this country has."

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'Trannies 49 XS Higher HIV Rate'

Huh. Another one from Breitbart. The widely shared 2015 article reported on "how dangerous it is to become 'transgender,'" with an HIV-infection-rate risk "49 times" the average. At the very least, Breitbart dramatically exaggerated the risk for transgender people. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reports on its website: "Among the 3.3 million HIV testing events reported to CDC in 2013, the percentage of transgender people who received a new HIV diagnosis was more than 3 times the national average." The reasons for this higher infection rate, the center states, include "stigma, discrimination, social rejection and exclusion," as well as "violence and lack of family support."

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'Obama is a Muslim'

This has been the most persistent myth pushed by the alt-right over the past decade, leading to the "birther" movement that launched Donald Trump's rise in conservative politics. When a woman at a Republican campaign event in 2008 said she couldn't trust Democratic presidential nominee Barack Obama because he was "an Arab," GOP nominee John McCain tried to knock down the rumor, saying, "No, ma'am. He's a decent family man and citizen that I just happen to have disagreements with on fundamental issues, and that's what this campaign's all about. He's not [an Arab]." McCain continued: "I have to tell you: Sen. Obama is a decent person and a person you don't have to be scared of as president of the United States." The response from the crowd: Widespread boos. "Come on, John!" one voter yelled. Others called out "liar!" A 2015 CNN poll found that only 39 percent of Americans knew that Obama is a Christian.

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Gen. John Pershing (AP)

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This report focuses on popular myths propagated by alt-right and related groups, but of course false narratives are used by political activists of every ideological stripe. PolitiFact, FactCheck and Snopes are three respected websites that diligently debunk politically-motivated falsehoods.

-- Douglas Perry

Julie Evensen contributed to this report.