In mid-July 2025, a rumor was widely circulated online claiming that Pope Leo XIV had nominated pop superstar Taylor Swift for the Nobel Peace Prize.
For example, a July 16 post on Threads read (archived): "BREAKING: After Taylor Swift Major Donations to war victims in Iran, Israel, Ukraine, Gaza and Additional support for Texas Hill country flood victims, Pope Leo XIV Stuns World, Nominates Her, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, and Chef José Andrés for Nobel Peace Prize."
(trendingtales30ers/Threads)
The post had gained more than 9,000 likes and over 48,600 views as of this writing. Similar claims appeared elsewhere on Threads (archived).
However, we have rated this claim false.
Social media posts were mostly referring to an article (archived) published by an outlet called USAmidia. The article claimed that the pope had announced Nobel Peace Prize nominations for the three figures during "a public address from the Vatican." The piece contained details about Swift's nomination, citing her charitable donations and cultural influence.
The story contained quotes attributed to the pope, yet no news media outlets reported on the matter, per searches of Google, Bing (archived) and DuckDuckGo (archived). Had the pope made such an announcement, it would have generated news coverage from Vatican correspondents and international media outlets.
Also, the timeline made this claim impossible. The nomination deadline for the Nobel Peace Prize for 2025 was on Jan. 31 (archived), but the pope was not elected until May 8 (archived). He could not have submitted nominations for the 2025 prize since he was not pope when the deadline passed.
According to the Nobel Peace Prize official website, "none of the Nobel Committees do announce the names of nominees, neither to the media nor to the candidates themselves" and "the complete list of eligible nominees of any year's prizes is not disclosed for another 50 years".
Media Bias/Fact Check rated (archived) USAmidia as a "questionable source" with "very low" factual reporting. The site was described as a "clickbait entertainment site that publishes sensationalist and often false news with no transparency and no editorial accountability." The rating noted that "multiple stories published by USAmidia have been explicitly debunked by independent fact-checkers," and that the outlet did not issue corrections when stories were proven false.
Notably, Snopes previously debunked another false claim published by USAmidia about film director James Gunn filing a lawsuit against U.S. President Donald Trump, which was also proven false.