Fake Owen Jones article in the Guardian on ‘Palestine Pride’ shared online
What was claimed
Owen Jones wrote an opinion article for the Guardian with the headline: “Diversity and inclusion is in the heart of all Palestinians. Gaza will one day host the world’s largest Pride parade.”
Our verdict
This is a fake article. No such piece with this headline has been published by the Guardian.
A fake screenshot of a Guardian article has been circulating online. The image shows what appears to be an opinion article by columnist Owen Jones headlined “Diversity and inclusion is in the heart of all Palestinians. Gaza will one day host the world’s largest Pride parade”.
This article was never published by the Guardian, and the screenshot has been fabricated.
Posts containing the screenshot, which includes the Guardian masthead and a headshot of Mr Jones, have been shared on X (formerly Twitter) and Facebook in recent days.
Some versions of the screenshot include a publication date of 2 June 2024. However, searching for this article via Google did not yield any legitimate results. And the newspaper’s section for opinion articles written by Mr Jones does not include any article with this headline.
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Mr Jones did write an article for the Guardian on 2 June 2024, but it had the headline: “Bohemian Bristol Central could be the one contest Labour loses on election night. Here’s why”.
When we searched for this article using the online internet archive site, the Wayback Machine, it did not show any evidence that the headline had been changed.
Mr Jones has written many times about Gaza and the conflict in the Middle East for the Guardian, but none of these pieces have the headline included in the screenshot.
The Guardian told Full Fact that “the screenshot shared is not and has never been an article or headline published by the Guardian”.
The screenshot was also debunked by other fact checkers when it circulated in June 2024.
This isn’t the first time we’ve seen a fake Guardian opinion column being shared online—we have previously debunked faked articles on white people rightly being back the back of the queue for the NHS, Gaza ‘rivalling Bradford’, and articles claimed to be written by US Democrat Tim Walz, Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer and Eddie Izzard.
It’s always worth checking if social media pictures show what the posts say they do before you share them. For more advice, read our toolkit.
This article is part of our work fact checking potentially false pictures, videos and stories on Facebook. You can read more about this—and find out how to report Facebook content—here. For the purposes of that scheme, we’ve rated this claim as false because the screenshot is fake, and this article does not exist.
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