A photo of a man with puffy eyes and swollen lips, used as evidence of a false claim Africa Check debunked in May 2020, resurfaced on Facebook in June 2021 with another false claim. This time, it is described as showing a “Chinese man beaten in Kilimani for allegedly sending flowers to his watchman’s wife.”
Kilimani is a suburb of Nairobi, Kenya’s capital.
On 11 May 2020, the photo was posted with the claim it showed a “Chinese man mercilessly beaten in Kilimani for deliberately coughing in the face of a security guard”. On 11 May that year, the World Health Organization reported that Kenya had 672 confirmed Covid-19 cases, with 32 deaths.
Here’s the real story of the photo’s origins.
Stung by bees while harvesting honey
The photo first surfaced online in a now-deleted video posted on a Cambodia-based Facebook page on 1 May 2020. The video has since been deleted.
We also found the photo on a Facebook page in Thailand, posted in May 2020. It also appears in a Reddit post from a year ago. Both posts say the photo shows a man stung by bees while harvesting honey.
The photo appears to have originated in either Cambodia or Thailand, not Nairobi’s Kilimani neighbourhood. It doesn’t show a “Chinese man beaten in Kilimani for allegedly sending flowers to his watchman’s wife” in June 2021.
For publishers: what to do if your post is rated false
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Click on our guide for the steps you should follow.
Publishers guideAfrica Check teams up with Facebook
Africa Check is a partner in Meta's third-party fact-checking programme to help stop the spread of false information on social media.
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You can also help identify false information on Facebook. This guide explains how.
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