“I hear you, I see you and I stand with you,” reads the text in what looks like a tweet from KFC for Black History Month, which the United States recognizes in February.
The image in the supposed tweet: a chicken drumstick casting a shadow that looks like a raised fist.
“Still can’t believe KFC did this,” reads the text in a Feb. 16 Instagram post sharing the alleged tweet.
It was flagged as part of Facebook’s efforts to combat false news and misinformation on its News Feed. (Read more about our partnership with Meta, which owns Facebook and Instagram.)
The tweet doesn’t appear in KFC’s Twitter feed. The last time the official KFC account tweeted the word “Black” was in June 2020, when the fried-chicken company said, “We support our Black team members, partners, and customers.”
A KFC spokesperson told Agence France-Presse in 2022 — one of several years this fake tweet circulated on social media — that KFC didn’t tweet this for Black History Month, and that the company’s corporate account never shared the image or the statement in the tweet.
The drumstick image did appear in a 2020 post on the official Instagram account of KFC Trinidad and Tobago. The post has since been deleted but in a screenshot captured by The Root, it said “Happy Emancipation Day,” an Aug. 1 national holiday in Trinidad and Tobago celebrating the liberation of enslaved Africans in the British Empire.
On Aug. 1, 2020, KFC Trinidad Tobago apologized for the post on Instagram.
We rate claims that the Black History Month tweet is authentic False.
Source: PolitiFact.
