Over 30,000 retweets, zero retraction of completely fake news

JUNE 24, 2019

A tweet that went viral showing the Trump administration “torture” of children inside Border Patrol camps was actually from August 2015 when Obama was in office.

Actress Nancy Lee Grahn, who is verified on Twitter, tweeted, “Trump administration is forcing children 2 sleep on cement floor with an aluminum blanket & lights on all night. Sarah Fabian from DOJ argued in court that it was good enough & soap was unnecessary. Companies making 750 a kid a day to torture them.”

However, the photos which illustrated the tweet, taken inside a Border Patrol facility in Tucson, Arizona, are from August 2015.

A journalist responded to Grahn’s tweet by pointing out that it appeared she deliberately cut out the surveillance camera time stamp to mislead her audience.

“Quick question for you: did you deliberately crop out the date on these photos, was it accidental or did you never see any dates and you only had cropped versions all the way through?” asked Brian Cates.

“Note that the bottom of the black redaction box in the upper left corner of the uncropped photo is still VISIBLE in the cropped version that is in your tweet,” he added.

“Did you deliberately make that crop of the date on the photo, or did you never have an uncropped version and you’re only NOW learning the photos are from 2015, when Barack Obama and Jeh Johnson were in office?” asked Cates.

Despite being seemingly caught red handed posting deliberate fake news, Grahn still has the tweet pinned to her page. It has received over 30,000 retweets.

A 2016 NPR article also confirms that the photos were from 2015, but this didn’t stop them from going viral on Reddit.

A post titled “the new regime” included another tweet alongside the images which stated, “I swore I saw someone say it was wrong to compare these to concentration camps, but this is in fact what it is.”

The Reddit post has nearly 60,000 upvotes despite it being completely fake news.

This also serves as a reminder that the so-called detention and separation border policy of the Trump administration was actually an Obama administration policy.