These days, everyone has to be on the lookout for disinformation fomented in the darkest, most paranoid corners of the internet, like … Vogue Weddings?
The magazine — better known for peddling wild and dangerous theories about the reasonable cost of a wedding dress than fringe political beliefs — recently posted a fluffy story about how Dr. Anthony Fauci met his wife, branding it a “meet-cute fit for a medical rom-com.”
Bizarrely, when the publication promoted the story on Instagram Monday, the app slapped a huge banner on it reading “False information,” along with a note marked with a red exclamation point reading: “See why fact checkers say this is false.”
It linked to sternly worded denials by Politifact and two other sites. While we hoped that the fact-checkers had deemed the tale not, in point of fact, “fit for a medical rom-com,” the articles — more bizarrely still— were denying that Dr. Fauci’s wife, Christine Grady, is Ghislaine Maxwell’s sister.
Not surprisingly, though, the “meet-cute” story hadn’t mentioned the accused child-sex trafficker at all.
Anthony Fauci and Christine Grady’s “meet-cute” Vogue Weddings story was caught up in a debacle surrounding Ghislaine Maxwell.Getty Images
It seems that last summer there were indeed stories making the rounds falsely claiming that Grady and Maxwell are siblings, and it appears that the Vogue Weddings story got innocently caught up in that debacle.
Instragram didn’t get back to us with an explanation, but we can only assume that it has a feature that slapped the warning on the post automatically, and unfairly, in an attempt to quash the genuinely false information that had previously been circulating last year.
A Vogue insider told us, “It was an innocent mixup!”
The post has now been removed by Vogue Weddings.
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Originally published at https://pagesix.com/2021/02/23/instagram-accidentally-brands-vogue-weddings-story-false/ on .
