On June 4 2019, Facebook user James Johnson shared a video (archived here) purportedly showing large crowds of supporters shouting “we love Trump.” He then claimed that news outlets in the United Kingdom and United States deliberately refused to air the footage:
Attached to the video was a status update:
Massive crowd in the UK chants “We Love Trump” (that’s funny, every report i see on TV has the SAME anti-Trump video and NOTHING about this pro-Trump video)
The clip generated more than a million views in just 24 hours on Facebook, and it was shared tens of thousands of times.
The footage shows crowds waving Union Jack flags and chanting “we love Trump.” A speaker with a British accent addressed the “deplorables” of the United Kingdom who gathered, saying:
Mr. President, if you are seeing this, just know that the great deplorables of the United Kingdom love you, we are with you, we stand with you, and we want you to succeed. Forget about the people in London, forget about the establishment, forget about the detractors in the fake news media — the real people out there in the United Kingdom … we love you, Mr. President!”
Judging by the post’s share count, American Facebook users accepted that Johnson’s claims were accurate, and that British and American media were deliberately and misleadingly failing to report on a groundswell of support for the American President in June 2019.
However, fellow fact-checking site Lead Stories subsequently reported that the clip was misrepresented. The Facebook video in actuality was filmed at a Tommy Robinson rally nearly a year before in July 2018, in an event that as it turns out was widely covered by media outlets in both the UK and US:
This claim is false. Not only did the crowds shown here not assemble to support United States President Donald Trump’s visit to Britain in June 2019, the actual event shown was not at all ignored by either US or UK media when it legitimately took place in July 2018.