A roundup of some of the most popular but completely untrue stories and visuals of the week.

Claim

The Democratic National Committee is working with the Biden administration to monitor private citizens’ short message service (SMS), or text, communications in a move to crack down on anti-vaccine text messages.

The facts

The DNC has “no ability to access or read people’s private text messages” and is “not working with any government agency (including the White House) to try to see personal text messages,” according to Lucas Acosta, a senior spokesperson for the committee. Conservative lawmakers and social media users this week advanced the false claim that the DNC and other Biden allies were planning to spy on personal text messages in order to identify and dispel vaccine misinformation.

“So now the Biden Administration wants to get into people’s text messages … to force vaccine compliance and who knows what else,” Missouri Republican Sen. Josh Hawley tweeted. Arizona Republican Rep. Paul Gosar also picked up the false claim, tweeting, “The Biden Administration in partnership with the DNC, plans to monitor the private text messages of American citizens who question experimental, mRNA, emergency authorized, non-FDA approved vaccines.”

The false claim evolved online after Politico reported last Monday that the DNC and other Biden allies were “planning to engage fact-checkers more aggressively and work with SMS carriers to dispel misinformation about vaccines.” Social media users and conservative websites interpreted Politico’s report to mean the DNC would monitor private text messages in order to crack down on misinformation, but one of the reporters of the piece, Politico White House Correspondent Natasha Korecki, clarified on Twitter that this wasn’t true. “No,” Korecki tweeted last week in response to a question about whether the government would be reading personal texts.

Claim

President Joe Biden’s administration introduced a door-to-door campaign to offer COVID-19 vaccines as a way to confiscate guns or Bibles.

The facts

False information is circulating on social media around the Biden administration’s plan to drive up COVID-19 vaccination rates with a door-to-door campaign. Despite the delta variant of the coronavirus surging, only 48% of the U.S. population is fully vaccinated and many parts of the country are lagging behind. “Now we need to go to community-by-community, neighborhood-by-neighborhood, and oftentimes, door-to-door — literally knocking on doors — to get help to the remaining people” who need to be vaccinated, Biden said on July 6.

Some posts online falsely claim the campaign would force vaccines on people while others suggest the Biden administration’s initiative has a hidden agenda that will lead to guns or Bibles being confiscated. “The Biden Administration wants to knock on your door to see if you’re vaccinated,” Ohio Rep. Jim Jordan tweeted. “What’s next? Knocking on your door to see if you own a gun?”

North Carolina Rep. Madison Cawthorn echoed such claims during the recent Conservative Political Action Conference. “Think about the mechanisms they would have to build to be able to actually execute that massive of a thing,” Cawthorn said. “They could then go door to door and take your guns. They could go door to door and take your Bibles.”

But the vaccine campaign does not involve federal workers, it relies on local officials, private sector workers and volunteers to go into areas where there are lower vaccination rates and provide information on where to access the vaccine. Furthermore, federal law prohibits creating a national gun registry. White House press secretary Jen Psaki countered some of the false claims in a press conference on July 9. “This is grassroots volunteers, this is members of the clergy, these are volunteers who believe that people across the country, especially in low-vaccinated areas, should have accurate information, should have information about where they can get vaccinated, where they can save their own lives and their neighbors’ lives and their family members’ lives,” Psaki said. The grassroots component of the U.S. vaccination campaign has been in operation since April and was funded by Congress in the $1.9 trillion COVID-19 relief bill passed in March, the AP reported.

Claim

President Joe Biden’s initiative for a door-to-door campaign to encourage vaccination for COVID-19 is a violation of the federal law that restricts the release of medical information.

The facts

Biden pitched a door-knocking campaign as a way to get vaccine information and assistance to more people, not probe Americans about whether they have been vaccinated. But even if officials or volunteers did ask people that question, it wouldn’t be a violation of federal health privacy laws, according to experts. Nevertheless, social media users and political candidates have spread false claims that the campaign infringes on the federal health privacy law known as the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act, or HIPAA.

If someone does come to your door to encourage you to get the COVID-19 vaccine, you have no obligation to tell them whether you have been vaccinated, said Kayte Spector-Bagdady, lawyer and associate director for the Center for Bioethics and Social Science in Medicine at the University of Michigan Medical School.

Claim

Pennsylvania initiated a full audit of the rigged November 2020 election.

The facts

The state of Pennsylvania did not initiate an election audit. Last Wednesday, Pennsylvania state Sen. Doug Mastriano said he was launching a “forensic investigation” and issued letters to officials in three counties, requesting sweeping elections-related information. The letters threatened counties with subpoenas if they don’t respond affirmatively by July’s end, according to reporting by The Associated Press.