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On July 20, 2022, a website called Vancouver Times published an article claiming that the CEO of Tim Hortons, David Schwartz, had been arrested for allegedly possessing child pornography. However, no part of this rumor was true; it appeared to be made up out of whole cloth. The Vancouver Times said the story intended to be satirical. Not only was the premise of the arrest rumor completely false, but the article's alleged CEO of the Canadian breakfast company, Schwartz, was not actually the CEO. Rather, he is listed online as the co-chairman of a board governing Restaurant Brands International, the parent company of Tim Hortons. The beginning of the Vancouver Times article read like this: One of the most popular shares of the false article about Tim Hortons appeared to come from Twitter user @ChickenGate. That user shared the misleading story, apparently believing it to be a genuine news item. That tweet received well over 1,000 combined retweets and likes before it was deleted. After the article on the Vancouver Times website (vancouvertimes.org) was initially published, one of its writers apparently added an update to clarify that the story was satire. That update read as follows: Additionally, the website's About Us page included a similar disclaimer: The original article was later removed and was replaced with an update that read as follows: A search for the origins of VancouverTimes.org showed that the website was registered on a Ukrainian domain registrar in December 2021. It's unclear if the website existed on a different domain registrar prior to that time. Additionally, we found at least one website registered in Nigeria printed the article about Tim Hortons as if it was factual. In sum, no, Schwartz nor anyone with the Tim Hortons leadership team had been arrested on suspicion of child pornography. This false story came from an article that was labeled as satire.
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