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| - In March 2026, a rumor circulated online that Team USA figure skater Ilia Malinin received a message from U.S. President Donald Trump that the Olympian said "was meant to shut me up."
For example, on March 1, a post on Facebook (archived) read, "Ilia Malinin WENT LIVE AT 3 A.M. WITH AN EMERGENCY MESSAGE: 'I Got a Message Tonight — and It Was Meant to Shut Me Up.'"
Though the post did not specify who the alleged message was from, it included an image showing Malinin and Trump, appearing to suggest the message was from the president.
Other examples of the claim appeared on Facebook (archived, archived), and Snopes readers contacted us to ask whether the rumor was true.
We first used search engines such as Bing, DuckDuckGo, Google and Yahoo to locate possible evidence from credible sources about Trump's alleged message to Malinin (archived, archived, archived, archived). If the story was true, journalists with reputable news outlets, such as The Associated Press or Reuters, would have widely reported on it. That was not the case.
Instead, in December 2025, months before the story about Malinin's alleged message from Trump circulated online, the fact checking website Lead Stories found tens of identical, fake stories circulating with the names of other celebrities and presidents. Online searches revealed several such identical stories featuring other celebrities including the rappers Eminem and Jelly Roll and the U.K.'s Prince William (archived, archived, archived) also circulating in March 2026.
Those rumors, and the one about Malinin, were fictional. The claim about Malinin appeared to originate from the Facebook page Frozen Grace and a blog that used artificial intelligence tools to create the story about the figure skater.
Given the above, we have rated this claim false.
Creators of such content capitalize on social media users' willingness to believe and share the made-up stories, profiting from advertising revenue on external websites to which the posts link. (Snopes has previously reported on this business strategy.)
We contacted a manager of the the Frozen Grace Facebook page to ask why it had created the false story about Malinin without a disclaimer to note its inauthenticity. We also contacted Malinin's management about the story. We will update this report if we receive responses.
Frozen Grace's post spreading the false rumor about Malinin included a link in the comment section to an article on an advertisement-filled blog.
That article had several indications of being AI-generated text. Most notably, the article replaced the letter "N" with the Cyrillic letter "П" throughout the text. Reputable news media outlets would likely not make such an error. It is possible this spelling was intentional to avoid moderation tools or ad restrictions. GPTZero, a tool that aims to detect AI-generated text, determined with 88% certainty the article was AI-generated.
These types of AI detection tools are fallible. Snopes cautions people against using them for definitive answers on media's authenticity without supporting evidence.
The article further claimed Malinin had gone live on Instagram to share the alleged message from Trump with his followers. The figure skater does have an active Instagram page, but it was not clear whether he had gone live on or around March 1. Malinin did not post about Trump during or (as of this writing) after the 2026 Winter Olympics.
The fictional story about Malinin resembled glurge, which Dictionary.com defines as "stories, often sent by email, that are supposed to be true and uplifting, but which are often fabricated and sentimental."
Snopes has previously investigated a series of rumors about the 2026 Winter Olympics.
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