Taylor Swift Does Not Want Statue Toppled
The Claim
Taylor Swift said that the US should remove the Statue of Liberty.
News posted on
Emerging story
An image circulating on Facebook is a screenshot of a news story by G1, a Brazilian news site. The post says: "Taylor Swift says we should remove The Statue Of Liberty. How can you have a moment [sic] to freedom that was built by slaves. Racist monuments make me sick."
Users across social media platforms reposted the article and reacted with rage.
Misbar’s Analysis
Misbar’s investigation shows that the image is fake. Using G1's search engine, we found that the magazine has not published any articles about Taylor Swift’s feelings about the Statue of Liberty.
Reverse searching the image only led to the Facebook posts, and searching for the headline only led to social media users’ commentary on it.
The story likely circulated due to Swift’s public statement about controversial Southern monuments following Black Lives Matter protests. On June 12, 2020, Swift posted a Tweet that said that statues of Edward Carmack and Nathan Bedford Forrest celebrate racism. She said: “As a Tennessean, it makes me sick that there are monuments standing in our state that celebrate racist historical figures who did evil things. Edward Carmack and Nathan Bedford Forrest were DESPICABLE figures in our state history and should be treated as such.”
Carmack was a white newspaper editor who demanded retaliation against black writer Ida B. Wells, the “Mother of the Civil Rights Movement,” when she wrote about the horrors of lynching. Carmack was later elected to the US House of Representatives. Forrest was a white Confederate Army general known for his massacre of several hundred black soldiers and his role as Ku Klux Klan Grand Wizard.
However, while Swift advocated taking down the monuments of Carmack and Forrest, she never said that the Statue of Liberty should be taken down.
