A tweet came to the WhatsApp chat of La Silla Vacía (+57 3102940910) that attributes to Senator María Fernanda Cabal a phrase that says: “Reading books indoctrinates our young people. Books must be banned because they induce critical thinking and hence communism.”
The trill already has more than 69 thousand views, so we ran the Lie Detector on it and found that it is false. The senator from the Democratic Center did not say that.
This is the fake image:
There is no record of Cabal saying that books should be banned
The trill we’re checking out was posted on May 18 by @XPost1A, an account that usually posts memes, like this one, this one and this one.
However, we found that the phrase attributed to Cabal was first published on September 17, 2023 by the account @CarlArthurKing, which is described as “humor, jokes, laughter, sarcasm and irony.” This profile has published misinforming trills in the past (1, 2, 3, 4 and 5).
We did three Google searches (1, 2 and 3) for the alleged phrase that the @CarArthurKing account attributed to Cabal, but there are no results or news confirming that the senator said that. That is an indication that this is false information, because if Cabal had made that statement there would be some media coverage.
We also checked Cabal’s social networks and there is no tweet or publication with that phrase (1, 2 and 3).
In the Lie Detector we have already checked other statements that have been falsely attributed to the senator (here, here and here).
Therefore, we classify the publication as false.
