Nigel Farage was met with protest when he travelled to Edinburgh for a Brexit Party campaign rally.
Right-wing figures have faced confrontations with protesters during the European election campaign which has included a new trend of throwing milkshakes at certain candidates.
Tommy Robinson and Ukip candidate Carl Benjamin have been targeted in the trend. Farage avoided the same fate during his Scottish trip but was later ‘milkshaked’ in Newcastle.
However, The Scotsman reported his Edinburgh appearance was protested by around one hundred people, who he described as a “howling mob”.
Shortly after this event, a screengrab of a tweet purportedly from his account was shared more than 2,300 times on Twitter.
Please please retweet this far and wide and ask your followers to do the same. pic.twitter.com/7UWValbqcc
— Ernie (@thefifer1314) May 18, 2019
Ferret Fact Service looked at the claim and found it to be FFS!
Evidence
The tweet comes from an unverified account which posted the alleged tweet as a screengrab and asked followers to retweet the image as much as possible.
There are a few telltale signs that the above tweet was not one sent by Nigel Farage.
While posting something ill-judged on social media then quickly deleting is not uncommon, they are usually archived by various websites which capture deleted tweets by politicians.
Politwoops is the most comprehensive site and has a full archive of all tweets sent then deleted by Nigel Farage and many other elected politicians.
The tweet was supposed to have been sent on 17 May, 2019, the day Farage was speaking in Edinburgh. However, his Twitter timeline from that day does not feature the tweet, and Politwoops has no record of it. The only deleted tweet on that day was one saying: “We are going to Change Politics For Good next week” accompanied by a now-dead link.
There are also traces that editing has been done to the image. Each sentence appears to have been pasted into the background, and there is significant pixelation around the letters.
Enlarge
The details of the tweet show it was allegedly sent on 17 May 2019, but the numbers do not line up with the number 7 slightly below the rest of the line. This suggests that may have been changed to update the date of another unrelated tweet, used as the basis for the hoax statement.
Ferret Fact Service verdict: FFS
This image of a tweet allegedly using a derogatory word for Scottish people and claiming Scotland will “come to heel” is fake. It appears to have been digitally edited and does not appear on Nigel Farage’s account or on an archive of his deleted tweets.
FFS! (For Facts’ Sake) – The claim is baseless, ridiculous and/or logically impossible!
Ferret Fact Service (FFS) is a non-partisan fact checker, working to the International Fact-Checking Network fact-checkers’ code of principles. All the sources used in our checks are publicly available and the FFS fact-checking methodology can be viewed here. Want to suggest a fact check? Email us at factcheck@theferret.scot or join our Facebook group.
Photo thanks to Gage Skidmore, CC BY-SA 2.0
