Instagram has flagged Senator Dino Melaye over a fake post suggesting Congolese Nobel laureate Denis Mukwege quit a COVID-19 response team because he was asked to fabricate results.
Melaye shared the post on Monday to his 1.9 million followers and received the fake post flag in less than an hour.
“False information. The same information was reviewed by independent fact checkers in another post,” the notification on the former lawmaker’s post reads.
The fake quote had first been uploaded to Facebook in June and shared multiple times after Mukwege resigned from the team over problems with implementation of the response strategy he helped devise.
The fake text reads: “Dr Dénis Mukwege has just resigned from the Covid19 response team. He declares: ‘I cannot in any case dirty my Nobel Peace Prize for money, we had been ordered to declare any illness to be coranavirus [sic] and any death. In addition, the thing that displeased me is that, after more than 100 samples none came out positive. I have a career to protect and I am Congolese by blood. Getting rich by lying is a sin before God, I quit.’”
However, fact checkers including Reuters Fact Check team have disproved the quote.
On June 10, Mukwege released a statement on the website for The Panzi Foundation, which he founded, where he announced his resignation.
