Card Stacking
Card Stacking: only the facts that help one side.
How to spot it
Only the facts that help one side. The facts may be true, but the ones that cut the other way are left out, so the picture is false. Watch for a statistic without its baseline, a single good month presented as a trend, or an unverified boast set beside verified figures as if they were equal.
What doesn't count
Every argument chooses what to include. An opinion piece making one side's case, openly, isn't card stacking. The technique is presenting a selection as the whole picture.
Whether a fact is true is a separate question. That's what Semblen's claim checks are for, not this label.
Real examples
Each was flagged by Semblen's model, then chosen to stay on this page, so the examples don't change from day to day. A quote in a news article may be the outlet reporting what someone else said, and an ad may be quoting its opponent. Follow each link to check it in context.
In the news
“Dougan accused Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy of skimming billions of US aid money and causing thousands of innocent people to die”
“the far more accurate version of the chant in Arabic, which translates to "From the river to the sea, Palestine will be Arab”
“A DHS report says 75% of all murders in Fairfax County are committed by illegal aliens”
“has chimed in, falsely”
“reopening the border, defunding the police, allowing men and boys in girls' locker rooms, and taking more money out of Americans' pockets”
In government statements
“They've already SHOWN US”
“they have 159 ships, every one of them is right now at the bottom of the sea”
“taxpayers would bear a lifetime cost of $166,716 per illegal alien”
“FACT: This "New Yorker" is a criminal illegal alien from the Dominican Republic”
“he has done exactly that — delivering results at a pace Washington has never seen”
“his $2 billion MAGA slush fund to funnel American taxpayers' money to himself”
Related techniques
Something wrong or unclear on this page?
Tell us. A person reads every note. Use Yes / No under any example if it isn't really card stacking: two readers saying no takes it off the page.
Check something yourself
Paste an article, a speech or a video link into the analyzer and Semblen marks the words that use card stacking or any other technique, and says why. It flags rhetorical techniques, not political tilt.