The far-right misinformation machine – namely Tim Pool, Ian Miles Cheong among others have been sharing a video from Rupty wire service that shows two Rochester protesters blocking a door. Their claim – which is a lie (and they know it’s a lie as they have been corrected by multiple people at this point) – is that in the video below “Black Lives Matter rioters try to break into apartment buildings.”
As you can see in this screen capture from Google Street view of the Court Street Parking Garage… it’s the same structure.
Here’s another photo from later in the evening
Here are several more photos from the night that I took, as unlike Tim and Ian I was physically there (Tim doesn’t get out much these days and Ian lives in a different continent). In the first photo below you can actually see two of the men in the video calling out to the police. (I won’t repeat what they were saying)
Below that photo are two other images of the garage where police were stationing themselves to prevent protesters from getting into the GARAGE. In the wider shot you can see that it is only that a garage for cars, one that was relatively empty.
Sadly the videos that these two idiots and others shared reached into the millions – more than all of the traffic of my days of coverage could ever hope to reach. This is the problem with fact-checking being the sole solution to the problem of internet misinformation. Once the genie’s out of the bottle… well you know the rest, hell we’re all living it.
This is why it’s important to have journalists on the ground in situations like this. If you have the ability to help me continue this work please do so – patreon, paypal, venmo (zdroberts)
