Politifact identifies a "lie of the year". It's interesting to see the "lie of the year" that they selected from 2015 to 2020:
2015
PolitiFact's 2015 Lie of the Year was the "various statements" made by 2016 Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump. Politifact found that 76% of Trump's statements that they reviewed were rated "Mostly False," "False" or "Pants on Fire". Statements that were rated "Pants on Fire" included his assertion that the Mexican government sends "the bad ones over" the border into the United States, and his claim that he saw "thousands and thousands" of people cheering the collapse of the
World Trade Center on 9/11.
[26]
2016
PolitiFact's 2016 Lie of the Year was "
fake news" referring to fabricated news stories including the
Pizzagate conspiracy theory.
[27]
2017
PolitiFact's 2017 Lie of the Year was Donald Trump's claim that
Russian election interference is a "made-up story."
[28] The annual poll found 56.36% of the 5080 respondents agreed that Trump's "Pants on Fire" statement deserved the distinction.
[29] Raul Labrador's statement that "Nobody dies because they don't have access to health care," and Sean Spicer's statement that "[Trump's audience] was the largest audience to witness an inauguration, period," came in second and third place getting 14.47% and 14.25% of the vote respectively. In its article, PolitiFact points to multiple occasions where Donald Trump stated that Russia had not interfered with the election despite multiple government agencies claiming otherwise.
2018
Politifact's 2018 Lie of the Year was that survivors of the
Stoneman Douglas High School shooting were
crisis actors. These conspiracy theories were spread on blogs and social media by sources including
InfoWars,
[30] and targeted students including
Emma González and
David Hogg, who became prominent gun control activists in the wake of the shooting and helped organize the
March for our Lives.
2019
Politifact's 2019 Lie of the Year was Donald Trump's claim that the anonymous whistleblower who reported possible presidential misconduct got the report of his phone call with Ukrainian President
Volodymyr Zelensky "almost completely wrong."
[31] The whistleblower complaint alleged that President Trump urged President Zelensky to conduct an investigation into Trump's political rival in return for promised military aid.
2020
The 2020 Lie of the Year was
misinformation related to the COVID-19 pandemic; specifically, theories that either deny the existence of the disease outright, or claim that the disease is much less deadly than it actually is. In particular,
Donald Trump was mentioned as a main supporter of such conspiracy theories.
[32]
