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A caravan of asylum seekers heading toward the United States border from Guatemala in the fall of 2018 was seized on as a campaign issue by many politicians heading into the 2018 U.S. midterm elections. As with most hot-button political issues, internet trolls quickly spread hoaxes and unfounded rumors maligning the caravan group. On 2 November 2018, a social media user shared a photograph to the Bill O'Reilly Fans Facebook group that supposedly depicted a scene in which migrants in the Guatemalan Caravan stand on, and then urinate on, U.S. flag before throwing it in the trash can: But the image depicted none of those claimed aspects: It was several years old (not recent), was taken in the United States (not along the caravan), and didn't capture anyone urinating on a flag. This photograph was snapped in April 2016 at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee before a campaign appearance there by then-candidate Donald Trump, and it shows a protester standing (not urinating) on a U.S. flag. A news account from Milwaukee television station WITI stated that the protester stomped on the flag but did not report that anyone urinated on the flag: Media Milwaukee, the university's student newspaper, provided some additional context about the protest: The original photograph can be seen here, and a video report on the protest from WITI can be viewed below: This was not the first time that miscaptioned photographs were used to falsely accuse caravan members of desecrating the U.S. flag. In October 2018, a series of old and unrelated photographs were shared as if they capturedmigrants burning a U.S. flag.
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