Jacob Silverman | Longreads | July 2018 | 8 minutes (1,917 words)

Last week, James Woods, an actor who supports Trump and delights in right-wing memes, tweeted a photo of a woman at a rally. The woman wore a yellow placard that read “My Legs Are Open For Refugees.” Woods, amused and apparently unimpressed by the woman’s appearance, wrote, “Finally, a real solution to stop illegal immigration.” The photo was fake. The words “Legs Are” were, clearly—and quite poorly—edited into the image. That didn’t stop Woods from sharing the photo, which was retweeted more than 7,400 times and picked up by Nigel Farage, a prominent member of the UK Independence Party, and popular pro-Trump accounts. For a certain faction of right-wing Twitter users, the image was another piece of evidence validating a noxious truth.

Eventually, a photographer named Lasia Kretzel saw the picture. Kretzel was disturbed; she had taken the original photograph, in which the sign read, “My Door Is Open for Refugees.” The sign also had a stamp from Amnesty International that had been removed in some edits. Kretzel had captured the image more than two years ago, at a demonstration supporting Syrian refugees in Saskatoon, Canada. In a series of tweets, she laid out how it had been altered as a piece of propaganda designed to whip up anti-refugee sentiment. Her thread was retweeted more than 6,400 times. Soon, Farage deleted his wrongful tweet. But the Woods post remained up, zooming past Kretzel’s in popularity. It’s likely that few, if any, of his followers ever noticed the correction. Besides, even if the tweet was untrue, it was still a good troll, and it showed his fans what they wanted to see.  Read more…