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In September 2021, social media users enthusiastically shared a photograph of what appeared to be a sign outside a Chinese restaurant that offered a 95% discount to customers vaccinated against COVID-19, and attacked Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, a prominent Republican opponent of vaccine mandates, stating F*** DeSantis. Here's how the sign appeared in a popular Reddit post on Sep. 2. The restaurant's name was purportedly Phoenix Koi and the sign read: The picture spread widely on Facebook, too. The screenshot below shows just a selection of posts from September 2021, and demonstrates the popularity of the Phoenix Koi sign on that platform: In reality, the sign was fake. Not only was it the product of digital editing, but it derived from a website set up to allow users to generate an infinite variety of fake Chinese restaurant signs, with a different restaurant name and text each time. The website — Atom.Smasher.org — has been in existence for at least 15 years, and allows the user to enter a restaurant name and up to four lines of text, from which a fake sign is generated (the following example was not created by Snopes): Since 2005 at the latest, the same website has also hosted a generator for fake error messages, fake BBQ restaurant signs, and fake law firm signs.
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