Trump Fish-Gate ‘Fake News’ Gets 100K Facebook Shares: Anti-Trump Media Faulted For Over-Feeding Koi Carp Tale

President Donald Trump was videotaped feeding koi fish in Japan, as reported by the Inquisitr, with those who watched the video noting that Japan’s Prime Minister Shinzo Abe was the first to dump his box of fish food into the pond. Both men initially carefully spooned their koi food into the pond, with Abe giving up the spoon feeding and tossing his remaining fish food into the pond. Following suit, President Trump upended his box of fish food into the pond and smiled for the cameras. However, those who only saw certain photos that only displayed President Trump dumping his fish food into the pond seized the moment to criticize President Trump. Plenty of those headlines, which are being called “fake news” by Trump fans, have been shared more than 100,000 times on Facebook.

A search for the term “Trump fish” on Facebook reveals the article titled “Fishy business: Trump and Abe dump fish food into precious koi pond” by TheGuardian, which has been shared 22,555 times since Sunday. According to Snopes‘ fact check article, titled “Did Trump Impatiently Dump Fish Food in Japanese Koi Pond?” the whole melee began with a photo that was captioned incorrectly, with misleading statements.

The article titled “Trump feeds fish, winds up pouring entire box” by CNN has been shared nearly 25,000 times on Facebook since Monday. The piece titled “Donald Trump was supposed to gently feed koi fish. Then this happened,” by Independent has also been shared nearly 25,000 times since Monday. The piece named “Watch As Trump And Japanese Leader Totally Give Up On Feeding Fish In Japan” has been shared nearly 4,000 from HuffingtonPost, although that headline more correctly noted what happened.

Time set the record straight with their headline, titled “Trump Was Criticized for Overfeeding Fish. But Japan’s Prime Minister Did It First.” Trump was defended by other publications, such as the Gizmodo article titled “That Viral Photo of President Trump Dumping Fish Food Is Very Misleading.” However, other article titles, such as “Donald Trump dumps box of fish food into koi pond on Japan visit” by the Telegraph, which has been shared nearly 5,000 times since Monday, puts the blame squarely on Trump’s alleged over-feeding shoulders.

FoxNews also attempted to set the record straight with the headline, “What Trump koi fish controversy? Watch what really happened.” Articles setting the record straight, including the headline “Twitter reacts as Trump dumps fish food into koi pond – but Abe did it first” by Global News, are now gaining Facebook shares in the wake of the controversy.

The Hill explains that the “Media shows why it’s so mistrusted after falsified Trump fish-feeding ‘story'” as a result of fish-gate. Headlines such as “Trump loses patience, dumps fish food at one go into koi pond” by Straits Times gained more than 5,000 Facebook shares before the details began to emerge. The headline “Anti-Trump media makes up fake story about overfeeding fish at Japanese koi pond,” by FoxNews has gained nearly 35,000 shares on Facebook in less than 24 hours since publication.

[Featured Image by Andrew Harnik/AP Images]