Senator Antonio Trillanes IV has become the subject of several fake stories in the past, followed by mostly negative comments from the netizens. This time, another story has claimed that a Fil-American cyclist flipped the senator the finger during his visit in the US.
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Facebook page “Philippine News Courier” shared the story, first published by Okd2.com. The photo accompanying the post may have seemed to have shown just what the claim was all about, but that was not really the case.
As of writing, the post has been shared almost 500 times since it was posted on November 1.
Upon checking the story, posted under “Humor & Satire,” it claimed that a female cyclist overtook Trillanes’ motorcade after he left US Senator Marco Rubio’s office and gave him a “middle finger salute.” It also claimed that another woman who saw the motorcade also gave the motorcade a thumbs down.
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An alleged report from The Guardian allegedly said, “The motorcade had to slow and the cyclist caught up, still offering the finger, before turning off in a different direction.”
The cyclist was later identified as Martha Cruz Percival, a Fil-Am. Percival allegedly said during an interview that the Filipinos who learned about Trillanes’ presence in their neighborhood were not happy about him and that it was pure coincidence that she saw the Filipino senator’s motorcade passing by while she was cycling.
However, a quick Google reverse image search was easily able to determine that Okd2 used the wrong photo to make it seem like it was Trillanes who was the intended recipient of the middle fingered salute, but she was actually targeting US President Donald Trump.
The Telegraph and Mirror, UK news sites, published the photo of the cyclist, but she was actually flipping off Trump, not the Filipino senator. Okd2 just spun the story and even wrote the caption of the photo in their story to fit their claims against Trillanes.
Unfortunately, the comments on “Philippine News Courier’s” post showed that while some caught on with the fact that Okd2 used the photo with a misleading story and photo caption, others believed it.
These people would have been able to save themselves from falling for a false story if they bothered to read the full Okd2 article, spot the category under which it was published, and do some more research. The photo alone was a dead giveaway that the story was not true at all.
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