Fake Atlantic article targeting LGBTQ community spreads online

"At this weekend's Pride parade a man exposed his genitals to my 6 year old. She was horrified. Am I raising a bigot?" appears to be a headline from The Atlantic shared in a June 26, 2023 tweet.

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Screenshot from Twitter taken June 26, 2023

The supposed screenshot spread across platforms including Twitter, Instagram and TikTok after a weekend that saw LGBTQ pride parades in US cities such as New York City and Chicago.

Conservative commentator Dinesh D'Souza, the director of a film that spread disinformation about the 2020 US elections, shared the image to his more than 3.4 million Twitter followers.

"A profound moral dilemma surfaces in the Ethics department over at @TheAtlantic," D'Souza said.

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Screenshot from Twitter taken June 26, 2023

But the article is not authentic.

"This image is crudely fabricated," Anna Bross, the magazine's senior vice president of communications, told AFP in a June 26 email. "It is not a screenshot of an actual Atlantic article."

She added: "For those who are irresponsibly sharing this image: it's remarkably easy to verify if something is real -- or not -- by visiting The Atlantic and searching our site."

No such article appears in live or archived versions of the website.

In fact, the made-up text does not match the format of other headlines from The Atlantic, which capitalizes the first letter of most words.

The fake article also falsely attributes its photo to a Reuters photographer. A photographer for the Indianapolis Star, a newspaper in the US state of Indiana, captured the original picture (archived here) during a 2022 parade in the state capital, reverse image search shows.

Bross told AFP the magazine had reported the fabricated screenshot to Twitter as a fake and a trademark infringement.

AFP has previously debunked other misinformation targeting The Atlantic, including here, here, here, here and here.