|
?:reviewBody
|
-
On 5 July 2016, the web site Southern Conservative Daily published a very brief post reporting that President Obama planned to remove the Statue of Liberty because it was offensive to Muslims. Although the headline of the article stated as much, its body read as follows: A 1 July 2010 clip of President Obama talking about the Statue of Liberty was attached to the article, during which the President did not mention removing the landmark or describe it as offensive to Muslims: The article did not explain exactly how the Statue of Liberty might offend Muslims, but the rumor was taken at face value by many social media users despite that omission. Needless to say, no news reports have suggested that President Obama has any designs to do anything to the Statue of Liberty, much less plans to close or remove it. The rumor wasn't new in July 2016, as a few months earlier the web site Departed.co published the same article verbatim and also asserted that the President had made such a claim on Monday. As it turned out, the sentence was a snippet taken from a 30 September 2013 CNSNews article which itself misleadingly presented President Obama's comments on a looming government shutdown: The linked remarks made by President Obama described the consequences of a government shutdown, not a personal plan of his to do away with the Statue of Liberty: These comments were completely unrelated to Muslims and did not single out the Statue of Liberty. However, a 1 January 2016 piece published by fake news outlet NotAllowedTo separately (and falsely) claimed that Muslims wanted to take the statue down because of plans to establish Shariah law: It appears the rumor President Obama plans to remove the Statue of Liberty because it offends Muslims was the result of fake news claims mashed up with remarks from 2013 that were deliberately taken out of context in order to generate outrage, and thus more web site clicks.
(en)
|
![[This page as RDF]](http://data.gesis.org/claimskg/static/rdf-icon.gif){kind=icon}