Claim: American actress and singer Zendaya is pregnant with partner Tom Holland’s baby.
Fact: Zendaya is not pregnant. The actress addressed the rumours — which can be traced back to a TikTok video by user @ryan.roberts — on her Instagram story.
On 15 June 2022, thousands of tweets flooded Twitter users’ timelines as reports of Zendaya being pregnant with Tom Holland’s baby went viral. Multiple people reacted to the claim and various outlets also picked up the story.
Many social media posts included a screenshot allegedly of an Instagram post by Zendaya that showed a sonogram and was captioned, “I love you. Halfway there. @tomholland.”
Even American rapper Lil Nas X fell for the rumour, tweeting, “i hate twitter because i’m sitting here about to congratulate zendaya via dm about a baby that doesn’t exist.”
Fact or Fiction?
Soch Fact Check investigated the source of the claim and found a video posted by TikToker @ryan.roberts.
The viral clip features Roberts appearing surprised, with the aforementioned screenshot in the background, and ends with a snippet from 2011 of American media personality Kris Jenner dancing and lip-syncing to Christina Aguilera’s song, ‘Lady Marmalade’, with an on-screen caption that reads, “You just got Krissed.”
Screenshots of the viral, misleading videos uploaded on TikTok by users @ryan.roberts and @loaftubeclips
#Krissed is a hashtag that accompanies the viral trend wherein content creators lure people into believing a false claim until, towards the end of a given clip, Jenner appears dancing, according to Insider.
Shortly after the reports began to circulate, Zendaya uploaded an Instagram story, debunking the reports herself and saying, “See now, this is why I stay off Twitter… Just making stuff up for no reason… weekly.”
Additionally, Soch Fact Check checked Zendaya’s Instagram profile, @zendaya, where we found no such recent post or update that matches the screenshot shown in the viral TikTok. However, scrolling further down, we found a 31 January 2022 post that has the same caption. The sonogram image was likely lifted and applied to the post with the caption in question.
Virality
Soch Fact Check conducted a CrowdTangle analysis for the two-day period from 15 to 17 June 2022 using the following search terms:
- “zendaya is pregnant”
- “#ZendayaPregnant”
On Facebook, the first search term turned up 388 posts with more than 14,000 interactions, while, on Instagram, there were 35 posts with over 75,700 interactions. The second search term yielded 317 interactions across 10 Facebook posts and 2,300 interactions across three Instagram posts. However, it is important to note that both search terms included a large number of posts carrying reports that debunked the rumour following Zendaya’s rebuttal.
The tweets under the hashtag, #ZendayaPregnant, have hundreds of thousands of ‘likes’. Some outlets used the phrase, “Is #Zendaya really pregnant,” in their Facebook and Instagram posts, which perhaps fueled the rumours further; these included three verified Facebook pages — ‘101.3 KDWB’, ‘POWER 96.1’, and ‘Kiss107’ — and two verified Instagram accounts — @poweratl and @channel955.
Soch Fact Check also used Twitter analytics aggregator Social Bearing to analyse the virality and impact of the rumour. At least 1,300 tweets reached 38,764,074 and received 38,862,193 impressions over the past one-day period, a day after the original TikTok video was uploaded.
Misleading and/doctored images used by various media outlets to perpetuate false reports about Zendaya being pregnant
Through Social Bearing, we also found three tweets — here, here, and here — that perpetuated the rumour, as well as videos shared to the YouTube accounts of Benji, which is verified, and OUTPOST. A third YouTube channel called Loaf Tube has a TikTok account where they posted two viral videos relevant to the claim, archived here and here.
The rumour can also be seen shared here, here, and here on Facebook, as well as on the verified pages ‘APN News’ and ‘IndiaTV Showbiz’.
Conclusion: Zendaya is not pregnant and addressed the rumours — which can be traced back to a video posted by TikToker @ryan.roberts — on her Instagram story.