Fact Check Substack with a Superprompt

CLAIM:

On 20 November 2025, 30,000 students in Charlotte, North Carolina, staged a walkout from school to protest Trump’s ICE immigration raids in the city.

FACT CHECK RESULT:

The past couple weeks here in Charlotte, North Carolina, have been both surreal and crazy. For insights into why, I recommend you watch the video from last Monday night’s (24 Nov 2025) “Charlotte Mass Moral Monday” by “Repairers of the Breach.” In this media literacy-focused post, however, I’m NOT going to reflect on the wider impacts and experiences of living here in Charlotte during “Operation Charlotte’s Web” by ICE and US Customs and Border Patrol (CBP) agents, as presenters did in that Mass Moral Monday gathering. For some of my deeper reflections on those events, please refer to my November 19th video on my “Resist and Heal” Substack (also on YouTube) as well as my “notes” on the same Substack channel.

In this post, I am going to address a claim posted to the “Really American” Substack on November 20th related to “Operation Charlotte’s Web”: An alleged “walkout by 30,000 students in Charlotte to protest Trump’s ICE immigration raids in the city.” I’m going to highlight this misinformation shared on Substack (and to date, NOT redacted) by a very popular channel funded by a liberal SuperPAC… and my process of using the “SIFT Superprompt” by Mike Caufield to fact check it. *

Here is my TL;DNR summary of my fact check results: The claim that 30,000 students in Charlotte, NC, staged a walkout to protest ICE raids in November 2025 is false. There is no evidence from local school officials, police, or reputable news organizations to support this figure or the occurrence of such an event.

Background

On November 20, 2025 at 11:56am ET, authors of the “Really American” Substack channel shared a 10 second video purporting to show student protesters walking around a track at a sports stadium, with the accompanying text:

Wow! 30,000 students in Charlotte just staged a walkout to protest Trump’s ICE immigration raids in the city.

Young generation standing up ?

As of this evening, 10 days later, that Substack note has 21,080 likes, 366 replies, and 3,282 Restacks. (For those not familiar with Substack, a “restack” is like a “retweet” on Twitter / X.)

Fact Checking with the SIFT Superprompt

To fact check this claim, I used the “SIFT Toolbox” / “Deep Background” or SIFT AI Superprompt developed by Mike Caufield at the University of Washington’s Center for an Informed Public. I facilitated a webinar on November 3rd and 15th for the Media Education Lab highlighting how to use it to fact check claims like this. The most recent version of the “SIFT Toolbox” is a 338 line prompt to use with generative AI platforms like Claude Pro, ChatGPT Pro, and Gemini Pro, which combines many of the best practices professional fact checkers use when evaluating and researching claims.

Mike Caufield recommends using a PRO AI model with his SIFT superprompt, and currently prefers Claude Pro. In this case, because I’m not currently paying for Claude Pro, I used ChatGPT 5.1 Thinking model and Google Gemini Pro. My archived AI chat conversations are available for both models:

• ChatGPT 5.1 Thinking chat log
• Google Gemini Thinking with 3 Pro chat log

In this case, Gemini Pro produced the most visually pleasing and helpful tabular summaries of the fact checking analysis. These included the following tables, which I will embed and link below as screenshots:

1. Verified Facts Table
2. Errors and Corrections Table
3. Corrections Summary
4. Potential Leads
5. Assessment of Source Usefulness
6. Revised Summary

Before sharing these tables of results, I’ll quote the Gemini provided “Notes on the Information Environment:”

This post exemplifies “Zombie Content” or “Engagement Bait” within the political information space. In this environment, old or unrelated footage is frequently reposted with sensational new captions to react to current events (in this case, the presidency/influence of Donald Trump in 2025). The specific number “30,000” is likely chosen to sound impressive but plausible enough to a casual scroller, despite being statistically improbable for a local school district event. The use of “Substack Notes” allows for rapid, unchecked dissemination within a like-minded community (echo chamber), bypassing traditional editorial verification.

Here are some of my key takeaways from this fact checking experience:

1. It’s very important to personally fact check viral political content.
2. Particularly when viewing content WITHOUT attribution links / links for more reading, we should be VERY WARY of liking / re-sharing / further amplifying media and claims.
3. Mike Caufield’s “SIFT Toolbox” can be a useful and powerful addition to our media literacy strategies when it comes to fact checking and verifying claims online.
4. Even though the results of the SIFT Toolbox can look VERY professional and convincing, we need to remember these are still the results / output of an imperfect and frequently error-prone artificial intelligence large language model.

To learn more about media literacy and fact checking, I recommend:

1. Following and subscribing to Mike Caufield’s Substack, “The End(s) of Argument.”
2. Checking out the November 2025 Media Education Lab webinar, “Fact Checking with AI Superprompts,” including the listed “recommended media” and “optional media” links.
3. Following and subscribing to my Substack, “Media Literacy with Wes.”

All the screenshots used in this post are also shared in this Flickr album. More media literacy resources are available on medialiteracy.wesfryer.com.

* Thanks to Carol Sawyer, one of the volunteer leaders of Indivisible CLT, for initially alerting me to the fact that this Substack post was / is false and constitutes misinformation.