CHAZ, Pope Leo XIV, and NYT: Social Media Confusion

When commenters asked whether the heading was genuine, Kaplowitz reacted with extra articles urging it was true. Tagging the New York Times, he additionally created, “CHAZ was in Seattle, not Portland,” adding an expletive.

The CHAZ Occupation in Seattle

Complying with George Floyd’s murder in 2020, militants occupied a number of blocks in Seattle’s Capitol Hillside area as component of a Capitol Hillside Inhabited Protest, or CHOP, which likewise was called the Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone, or CHAZ. The protest began in very early June and lasted about 3 and a fifty percent weeks.

Considered that Kaplowitz is a comedian (although his X account does not clearly state that), it’s possible he planned the messages as a trick, but he never claimed so and the photo fed complication as it spread out swiftly across social mediawithout clarityor disclaimers.

Kaplowitz’s X Post and Fake Headline

“Wait how woke is this pope,” created comedian Jeremy Kaplowitz May 8. His X message, which had actually been seen about 900,000 times as of mid-afternoon May 9, included a screenshot that appeared to be a heading from The New York Times.

Searching for the Truth in NYT

Searching the Times’ web site for the headline returned no results. An even more basic search for “Pope Leo XIV” returned 45 outcomes as of about 11 a.m. May 9, but none of those posts linked Prevost to an autonomous zone.

“Pope Leo XIV was an establishing participant of the 2020 anarchist Rose city self-governing area known as CHAZ,” read the supposed heading in the Times’ font style. The subhead read: “Robert Francis Prevost spent a lot of his time in the early COVID-19 pandemic writing an anarchist zine in Rose city defining just how to ideal fist-fight policeman.”