On Jan. 1, 2026, an X user posted an image to the platform and claimed it showed day cares in Minnesota had donated more than $35 million to political campaigns in the previous two years. Social media users shared the image across platforms, with many tying the chart to recent reports detailing social services fraud in the state.
(X user @beaverd)
Snopes readers wrote in and searched the website asking whether Minnesota day cares had actually donated $35 million to political campaigns over the last two years. We found no evidence to support that claim. The post was false.
The post linked to a Substack blog using the url somaliscan.com, another apparent reference to the fraud cases in Minnesota which have been sometimes linked to day cares operated by the city's Somali American community. We reached out to the email address associated with the website for comment on this story. We were unable to contact the X user who initially posted the image.
Snopes received two statements from the email address associated with somaliscan.com. In both statements, administrators of the website said they were not aware of its data being used to spread false information, calling the claim that day cares had donated $35 million to political campaigns a "misreading of the data."
The page that displayed the data being used to spread the misinformation was taken down after this story was published. As of Jan. 19, 2026, it was not accessible.
What is CCAP?
The exact chart displayed in the image was visible under the website's "political" header and the "leaderboard" subheader. The "leaderboard" chart lacked a title, instead displaying the $35 million figure claimed in the X post. A line of text below the figure described it as "Total CCAP funding tracked."
The Minnesota Department of Children, Youth, and Families website says the Child Care Assistance Program aims to "help make quality child care affordable for families with low incomes." According to the Minnesota Star-Tribune and local ABC affiliate KSTP, it's one of the state's social services programs that was defrauded.
The two statements Snopes received from administrators of the somaliscan.com website described the data in different ways.
In the first response, administrators of the website described the figures as "public funds received by providers, sourced from the Minnesota Department of Human Services CCAP payment records obtained via public records requests."
In the second response, the administrators described the figures as "political donations from businesses that also happen to receive CCAP funding."
It was unclear why the statements defined the data differently. We responded to both messages asking for clarification and await a response.
Regardless, the amount of money the day care centers received from CCAP has nothing to do with the amount of money the centers ostensibly donated to political campaigns. The claim that day cares donated $35 million to political campaigns did not appear to be supported by the chart.
Original poster later called the claim misinformation
According to a follow-up X post from the same account that originally shared the chart, the post's misleading nature was intentional.
"WAIT BUT THATS CCAP FUNDING NOT POLITICAL GRANTS NOOOOO ITS MISINFORMATION!!!" the follow-up post began, acknowledging the confusion. "We dont care. We have just stopped following the rules, like everyone else did a LONG time ago."
Other suspicious things we noticed
Because it's not every day that an internet user admits to posting misinformation, here are other red flags in the chart that readers might find useful when considering other rumors:
First, a basic piece of circumstantial evidence that immediately caught our notice: The "leaderboard" displays 11 different "providers," nine in Minneapolis and two in its suburbs. It certainly wasn't proof of any intentional manipulation, but making a leaderboard of 11 items is peculiar. Gut instincts might expect a page titled "leaderboard" to contain a more standard number — say, top five or 10.
Next, we investigated the leaderboard more thoroughly by clicking on the providers' names, which brought us to a more detailed breakdown on each individual provider. The page listed the sites' purported CCAP funding in the fiscal years 2024 and 2025 and information like the site's address and license number. It also provided a link to the Minnesota Department of Human Services' lookup page for each site.
But clicking on the Minnesota DHS link revealed that the DHS page contained no financial information at all. It provided all information present on the page except the most important number — the CCAP funding. This was a red flag — while mixing data from different sources is relatively common, the lack of a direct source link for the CCAP funding numbers effectively slows down the work of someone hoping to check whether the numbers are accurate.
So, Snopes, then checked all the databases available on the somaliscan.com website looking for the source of the CCAP funding data. It was nowhere to be found.
Further, Snopes looked at the crowdsourcing tab, which contained an open call for internet users hoping to expose fraud to submit certain Freedom of Information Act requests. At the very top of the list, with a "critical" priority, was acquiring Minnesota's "CCAP Provider Payment Data." While it's not impossible that the two datasets were different, it was unclear how the page could have created its "leaderboard" of CCAP data despite not publishing that CCAP data anywhere else on the website, all the while advertising that it "critically" needed CCAP provider data.