Hello and welcome to more or less on the BBC World Service, with a programme that tracks

down suspicious claims and questionable predictions and puts them to the test.

And I'm Tim Hartford.

Now here at More or Less we deal with the numbers put out there into the public domain.

Often they're invaluable, although we sometimes find they're a little unreliable, or they've

been misinterpreted or miscommunicated somewhere along the line, before eventually arriving

at our desk for careful examination.

But every so often, we come across figures that have been more purposefully manipulated

or misused, the types of sinister stats that become weapons of disinformation.

One such statistic that's been doing the rounds for years is the number of American children

who go missing each year.

It bubbles up every now and again, but for the last few years has been quite consistently

repeated by certain activists and politicians.

A recent example was US Republican representative Lauren Bobert, who took to Twitter in December

to say,

365,348 children went missing in 2020.

You haven't heard a word from the media about it.

That would be a huge number of missing children.

When there were around 73 million people under 18 in the USA in 2020, it would come in

at roughly one in 200 of all American children going missing that year, which would be terrifying.

If a school has, say, a thousand children, it would suggest five children disappearing

each year from each school.

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