Patrick Leigh

Facebook fact-checked memes with irrelevant Lead Stories article: A user posted two memes to Facebook with the comment "phnar phnar," typically used as either a laugh or a sexual-innuendo laugh by the British. The first meme showed a young woman looking frantic and upset on a phone, with text reading "They swabbed my are and it came back positive, I've got climate change." The other meme showed UK PM Boris Johnson holding out a chicken and saying "This is a goat." Below is a cartoon of a crowd of people, labeled as a BBC News live shot, with all of the crowd saying "That is a goat." Facebook applied a fact-check label to the post, calling it "Missing context," and linking to a Lead Stories fact-check article having nothing to do with the memes. The fact-check article is titled: "A Vaccinated Person Is NOT Wrong To Think An Unvaccinated Person Is A Threat To Their Health." Questions regarding the accuracy of the fact-check article aside, the article has zero relevance to these two memes. The fact-check article was addressing a different meme that claimed "If you think an unvaccinated person is a threat to a vaccinated person then you don't believe in vaccines." This also is in no way relevant to the memes in this post. The fact-check label noted that "The same information was checked in another post by fact-checkers. There may be small differences." However, it is clear that there are in fact large differences, and this fact-check is irrelevant to this meme. According to Facebook, users fail to click through fact-check interstitials 95% of the time.

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