Another day, another lie spread by anti-Israel radicals.
This time around, their target was Kentucky Fried Chicken.
You’d think the fast food restaurant wouldn’t come close to making it onto their radar, but considering McDonald’s and Starbucks have also been targeted for similar reasons, I guess it was only a matter of time before KFC, too, was on the receiving end of some undeserved attention.
It started with a message and image posted to KFC’s Facebook page last month, where they wrote “Sorry, no tents here, just finger-lickin’ good chicken, just the way you like it to spice up your weekend.”
Included were the hashtags #NoTentsJustChicken and #KFCAntigua. Below that was an image of a KFC bucket and a tent, with the “Tents” hashtag in between.
Because the outrage mobs have to be outraged at all times, not long after the post went up, anti-Israel influencers with hundreds of thousands of followers on social media shared a screengrab of the post along with the following claim:
As one might guess from seeing the Community Notes that were added, the claim that KFC was “mocking displaced Palestinians” by referencing tents was not remotely true. In fact, the lie was so egregious that media fact-checkers who normally act as apologists for leftists and their many falsehoods stepped in to refute what was being claimed.
Here’s what Reuters wrote:
On Feb. 15, 2024, the Facebook page for the Antigua Public Utilities Authority posted about a tent positioned “to facilitate linesman training” that went missing.[…]Meredith Krones, a spokesperson for KFC Global, told Reuters in an email that the “post was shared by the KFC Antigua team with the intention of joining the trending conversation in Antigua related to a tent that was reported missing by the Antigua Public Utilities Authority. This post is in no way related to the conflict in the Middle East and was removed when we realized it was being misinterpreted.”
AFP also did a fact check, which gave more details and which definitively proved KFC’s post was about the missing tent:
Similar accusations pinballed across Instagram and platforms including Facebook and X, formerly Twitter, where they were amplified by Britain-based creator Sulaiman Ahmed and Danish physician Anastasia Maria Loupis — both of whom have monetized misinformation about the fighting in the Gaza Strip.[…]Links to KFC’s post alluding to the missing APUA tent show up in Google search results, revealing the company shared it to both its Facebook page and KFC Antigua’s Instagram channel (archived here).In a follow-up post on February 18, APUA shared a photo of the tent.”Now that you’re gone, we are getting lots of shade but not quite like what you used to pitch,” the agency wrote (archived here).KFC commented under the post: “We think this one is more for North Coast Hardware and not us” (archived here).
(Note: Some of the Internet archive links in AFP’s write-up at times will not load correctly)
Some Antigua residents also responded to the false claims by correcting the record:
Though the “mocking” claim has been soundly debunked, all three tweets above that were posted by the influencers are still up as of this writing, further proving the point that these people don’t give a damn about the truth as long as there is a false anti-Israel narrative to be pushed.
— Stacey Matthews has also written under the pseudonym “Sister Toldjah” and can be reached via Twitter. —
CLICK HERE FOR FULL VERSION OF THIS STORY