Clickbait websites falsely accuse celebrities of boycotting Pride
- Published on July 9, 2025 at 18:42
- 6 min read
- By Eduard STARKBAUER, AFP Slovakia
- Translation and adaptation Caleigh KEATING , AFP USA
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"Max Verstappen announces his refusal to celebrate Pride Month in June -- he says 'WOKE' doesn't deserve to be commemorated," claims a June 3, 2025 Facebook post, which has garnered more than 140,000 reactions. In the first comment below the post there is a link to an article that claims to explain the reasons Verstappen has spoken out, including the increased politicization of sports.
Pride is celebrated in various countries in June and is used by the LGBTQ community to call for equal rights and acceptance. Pride parades are held in many cities around the world, with WorldPride hosted in the US capital Washington in 2025.
AFP, however, found no evidence that Verstappen ever said or wrote this statement.
No official reports
The blog articles about Max Verstappen contain various alleged quotes, including the statements: "'WOKE' culture has gone way too far" and "I will not be a part of this show."
But Paul Smith, director of communications for Red Bull Racing, Verstappen's F1 team, told AFP on July 2 that the claims were "absolute nonsense."
"Max has never said such things," he said.
None of the articles on the ad-filled WordPress websites provided direct evidence of or a link to Verstappen's purported statement. The articles also had no specific author.
Apart from the blog posts, AFP found no evidence of Verstappen's statement in video or written form.
As of July 8, 2025, Verstappen has not posted any similar statements on his social media accounts. There is no mention of the comment when searching for the terms "woke" and "pride" on Verstappen's Twitter account (archived here and here). Similarly, searching on Verstappen's Instagram page (archived here), there is no post containing the statement.
An internet search of the words "Verstappen pride" on July 8, 2025 did not yield a similar statement from an agency or news service, but rather a stream of articles from ad-filled website that claimed the post to be real, except for one article exposing the story as false.
A Google search of the same phrase by AFP on July 1, 2025 in Dutch activated Google's AI assistant, Gemini, which presented the false story as if it were real and used unsubstantiated Facebook posts as a source.
Various celebrities targeted
Further investigation also revealed identical or similar quotes attributed to other celebrities such as tennis player Novak Djokovic, with links in the comments pointing viewers to corresponding clickbait articles.
Tennis player Aryna Sabalenka, singers Paul McCartney and Dolly Parton and billionaire Elon Musk were among the targets of the misinformation.
For many of the celebrities, the same quote is wrongly attributed to them: "'WOKE' doesn't deserve to be commemorated."
In most headlines and captions, the word "woke" was written in capital letters. The articles are very similar stylistically, and the headlines of the articles about Djokovic and Musk are almost identical to the article about Verstappen.
Similar claims were also found in Slovak, German and Dutch, which AFP has fact-checked here, here and here.
The claim has even reached the political sphere, with far-right politicians in countries such as the Czech Republic and Austria sharing the alleged quotes from Djokovic.
But a member of Djokovic's public relations team told AFP on July 2: "I have checked everything and this is fake news. Novak never said anything like that."
PolitiFact reported the quote attributed to Parton appeared in non-existent media outlet "The Tennessee Voice," while fact-checking organizations Snopes and Lead Stories refuted that American musician Jelly Roll allegedly made the same statement, citing the absence of media references or mentions on the singer's social media accounts, where the statement supposedly appeared.
Monetizing misinformation
The articles show signs of AI slop -- low-quality content created by artificial intelligence and often distributed for profit. Such content has increasingly spread on YouTube and TikTok, in connection with the election of Pope Leo XIV and the trial of Sean "Diddy" Combs.
According to Alexios Mantzarlis, co-founder of Indicator and director of the Security, Trust and Safety Initiative at Cornell Tech (archived here), the primary goal of these websites is to make money through the Google Ads system. "This seems like a classic scheme of posting cheap incendiary claims on social media to drive traffic to ad-laden low-quality websites to generate some easy revenue," he told AFP in a July 1 email.
Mantzarlis discovered that fancy4work[.]com, the site that published the fake Dolly Parton story, shares domain characteristics with dozens of websites. "According to SimilarWeb, approximately 80 percent of its recent traffic (a sizeable 218,000 views) came from social media," he said.
The websites that shared the story about Verstappen in Dutch also fall under the same domain type, he said.
AFP also analyzed websites on July 1 that shared the Djokovic story through the same portal. More than 94 percent of visits to dailyus.cafex[.]biz and more than 96 percent of visits to sportnewss.livextop[.]com came through social media. This means the direct traffic to both websites is extremely low, a further indication that they rely on clickbait posts on social media to attract viewers.
Read more articles from AFP Fact Check on AI-related misinformation, here.
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