Fake News: Emma Gonzáles Did NOT Rip Up The U.S. Constitution

Fact Check

  • by: Maarten Schenk
Fake News: Emma Gonzáles Did NOT Rip Up The U.S. Constitution

Did Emma Gonzáles of "March for our Lives" rip up the United States Consititution on video? An animated meme being spread on social media seems to show Gonzales and three other students who survived the school shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida doing just that but the video is manipulated. Here's an example in the wild in a tweet from @getongab, an alt-right friendly social network:

We archived that tweet here in case it goes down.

In fact the video came from a shoot for Teen Vogue, as Philip Picardi, Chief Content Officer for that magazine, clarifies on Twitter:

As you can clearly see, Gonzáles is actually ripping up a paper target of the kind normally found at a shooting range.

While you can argue the "March for our Lives" movement indeed seeks to rip up the Second Amendment to the U.S. Constitution in a figurative sense, the literal events in the video did not take place. Even though it was probably meant to be "just a meme", some sort of crowdsourced editorial cartoon offering an observation on current events, it looks quite realistic and could potentially fool many people into believing things really happened that did not occur.

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  Maarten Schenk

Lead Stories co-founder Maarten Schenk is our resident expert on fake news and hoax websites. He likes to go beyond just debunking trending fake news stories and is endlessly fascinated by the dazzling variety of psychological and technical tricks used by the people and networks who intentionally spread made-up things on the internet.  He can often be found at conferences and events about fake news, disinformation and fact checking when he is not in his office in Belgium monitoring and tracking the latest fake article to go viral.

Read more about or contact Maarten Schenk

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