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In March 2019, social media users starting sharing a years-old article published by the website News Punch, an outlet with a long history of spewing misinformation. In this case the shared story claimed that California lawmakers had upheld the right of pedophiles to marry children as young as 10 years old: This article was tangentially related to a debate over a bill (Senate Bill 273) that sought to establish a minimum age requirement for marriage in the state of California. At the time the News Punch article was originally published in June 2017, California's marriage law only required minors (i.e., youths under age 18) to obtain a court order and permission from one parent in order to marry, without specifying any minimum age for marriage. News Punch didn't offer much in the way of original reporting on this topic. Their article stated a few falsehoods in its opening text, including the assertions that over 200,000 children had been allowed to legally wed adults in the last 15 years, and that California lawmakers had issued a ruling to uphold the rights of pedophiles. The article attempted to back up those claims by quoting liberally from two other articles: a July 2017 piece from the San Francisco Chronicle, and a blog post from the DC Clothesline, which was little more than a rehash of the the Chronicle's reporting. Neither of the referenced articles stated that 200,000 children has been allowed to legally wed adults over the last 15 years, or that California lawmakers had issued a ruling upholding the rights of pedophiles to marry 10-year-olds. Furthermore, while the Chronicle article mentioned several individuals who had married while under the age of 18, the youngest person cited in that report had wed at the age of 15, not 10. The Chronicle's original report concerned political pushback on the minimum marriage age proposal, not a ruling overturning any extant minimum age restriction, and it specifically noted that California simply had no data on how many marriages involved persons under age 18: Activists arguing for a minimum marriage age in the state claimed that 3,000 marriages involving minors took place every year in the state (which would work out to about 45,000 such marriages over the last 15 years, not the 200,000 claimed by News Punch). And even that lower figure is highly disputable: News Punch has a history of distorting the truth to generate outrage clickbait, particularly in articles related to child molestation and pedophilia. One way they do this is by taking quotes from genuine news articles, distorting their context, and then presenting them amid fear-mongering false claims. It should be noted that after this News Punch article was published in June 2017, California did pass Senate Bill 273. Although the new law did not establish a minimum marriage age, it did impose new requirements on persons under 18 seeking to marry, and it requires local registrars to compile statistics on marriages involving minors:
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