Swiss President Doris Leuthard remarked that President Rodrigo Duterte has the Filipino “citizens at heart,” or at least this is what the fake news site aljazeeranews-tv.com claimed the former has said.
Leuthard allegedly said that Duterte, like most leaders, “focuses on the issues which directly affect his own citizens.” She remarked on Duterte’s leadership during a news conference where she also reaffirmed Swiss-PH bilateral relations.
[ads2]
Leuthard allegedly gave the assurance that her country will continue to provide assistance to the Duterte administration without any condition and urged “regional blocs to cheap in in dealing with insecurity and drug menace facing Philippines without pointing fingers.” Note how the fake news site spelled out “chip in” (or contribute) as “cheap in.”
The site then quoted the Swiss president, “Insecurity and drugs is a global challenges which requires collaborative efforts to address.” Note the grammatical error in this one.
As with the other statements quoted by aljazeeranews-tv.com, we tried to verify this statement with Google’s help, too.
Of course, the grammatically problematic statement was only carried by aljazeeranews-tv.com.
And one more thing we noticed is that the statement that the article claimed Leuthard made about Duterte was not even found in the article’s content at all, which meant it was mainly put up as the headline for clickbait.
Here’s the entire story, as claimed by aljazeenews-tv.com:
With a title that says, “Swiss President: Just like most of us, President Duterte has his citizens at heart,” it launched other pro-Duterte blogs to say that the Swiss President praised Duterte, all while copying the entire content of the fake Al Jazeera website. Among the blogs that published the fake story are ddsnewstrend.com, du30today.com, duterteguardians.info, and dutertewarriors.com.
Both the Aljazeeranews-tv.com and the pro-Duterte blogs’ articles have been shared thousands of times on Facebook.
Facebook pages “Dugong Maharlika,” “Todayinmanila PH,” was among those that shared the fake aljazeeranews-tv.com article, with some individual Facebook users sharing them too on various fan pages on Facebook.
Facebook pages “Duterte Loyalist” and “Diehard Duterte Supporters” also shared the article from pro-Duterte blogs rejoicing over how the Swiss leader praised Duterte.
Aljazeeranews-tv.com has been quite notorious with its fake stories these past few days. This is the fake news site responsible for falsely claiming that the US Ambassador to the UN Nikki Haley said Duterte deserves space to run his country, Canadian PM Justin Trudeau asking why the world is “fighting” Duterte instead of the North Korean leader, and Loida Lewis received a deportation letter from the US government after she criticized Trump.
The fact that the story about the Swiss president saying Duterte has the Filipinos at heart came from a fake news site should be enough reason to be suspicious of its veracity. We further proved just how fake the story is when we checked how the grammatically erroneous statement quoted in the site was found on the fake news site alone.
Watch out for aljazeeranews-tv.com and for other blogs that might have sourced their content from the said fake news site. We might fall victim for its fake claims the way Manila Times columnist Yen Makabenta did when he wrote about Haley’s fake remarks on Duterte.
[ads3]
