We could probably do with a break from Trump this weekend, and when I saw this tweet over on X, with 5000 likes and 3,600 comments – overflowing with anti-Muslim rhetoric, it felt like a classic example of a post designed to make you think:
“That’s outrageous!”
Which, of course, is precisely the point.
So let’s look beyond that narrative……
The tweet
Clearly, the point of the tweet is to make you think that Muslims are taking over parks in London and banning people from walking their dogs. That’s certainly what all the irate people in the comments are reacting to. A lot of anger about “no go” areas, Muslims “taking over” and how Sadiq Khan/Labour are to blame.
But if you stop and ask yourself – how likely is it that members of a Muslim community in London are putting up signs like that? – you might decide to dig a little deeper into the story. Especially given the terrible formatting, and the lowercase “i” in Islamic area. A pretty big clue this wasn’t official.
Investigating the tweet
So the first thing I did was pop the headline into a search engine, as no link to the article was shared in the post. This brought up the piece in The Standard, and some similar articles reporting on the same incident.
The first clue was the date – 2nd June 2014 – over 10 years ago!
So the X post, with hundreds of thousands of views, used a screenshot and deliberately cropped off the date, to make it seem like this was a current issue. This enabled the “blame Labour/Khan” narrative – when the incident happened under a Conservative government AND one Boris Johnson as London Mayor!
Now onto the content of the article……
It explained that a local Labour MP reported the “unacceptable” and “provocative” signs to the police after a concerned dog walker informed him about their presence. The police confirmed that they took down the signs and increased their patrols locally to ensure the safety of all the community.
My Google search brought up several other articles reporting the same incident from early June 2014 but nothing subsequently on that particular story. Had Muslims in the community actually been trying to ban dogs from the park there would have been far more reporting of it after the initial article!
The most likely explanation, as covered in the article, is that the signs were put up by people deliberately trying to stoke division, and not actually by Muslims wanting dogs to be banned!
So, given the poorly formatted, cheap, hand-made signs with incorrect capitalisation, and no apparent follow-up reporting, it felt safe to assume that this wasn’t a case of Muslims banning dogs from a local park but was almost certainly a case of an anti-Muslim group or individual trying to cause division in their community.
But for completeness’ sake, I decided to use the “news” tab on Google to double-check if there was any further reporting on the story, that might not have shown up on the general Google search.
Further down the rabbit hole….
I found a Manchester Evening News article from July 2016, two years after the Standard article, reporting on leaflets being delivered to houses in Manchester saying dogs are ‘impure’ and should be ‘limited’ in ‘public spheres’ out of respect for Muslim families.
The leaflet was from an organisation called ‘Public Purity’.
I had a look at their Facebook page which claimed to be “a Muslim effort to preserve the purity of public spaces in the UK according to Islamic laws and beliefs”. It was created in March 2016 and posted regularly on the topic of how people should respect Muslims by not having dogs until it made its last post on 11th July 2016 – the day before the Manchester Evening News piece came out.
Almost all of the comments were filled with anti-Muslim hatred — but not a single Muslim voice defended the campaign or its claims.
And then there was the listed email address: gofuckyourself@ilovedogs.com. Subtle, right?
The website – www.4PublicPurity.org – no longer exists, but it is possible to use the web archive tool to find it.
It was an active website in July 2016 but had gone by 2018. It was full of much of the same rhetoric as the Facebook page – how Britons must stop bringing dogs out in public places out of respect for Muslims. Like the leaflet, the wording and language used were clunky and gramatically incorrect.
When I did a Google search for the organisation, I came across a Snopes article from 14th July 2016 highlighting all the reasons to suspect that this campaign was unlikely to be genuine:
- There is no evidence of the existence of an organization called For Public Purity prior to March 2016, when the Facebook page and website were first created.
- None of the group’s materials offer contact information beyond a web address and a social media presence.
- For Public Purity has no discernible association with any real-world Islamic organizations.
- Though it’s true that there are Islamic writings suggesting that dogs are unclean and their saliva, in particular, should be avoided, it is neither an issue on which all Muslims agree, nor, judging from the dearth of previous calls for banning dogs from public spaces, one that most Muslims find critical to their faith. Many Muslims are, in fact, dog owners.
The article also highlighted a, now deleted, 4Chan page (4Chan is a notorious prank, harassment site and often a source of conspiracies) where they discussed how the leaflet was getting lots of publicity and to “….like the FB page if you haven’t, this needs to look legit….”
So again, the whole thing appears to have been an organised campaign to spread divisive, anti-Muslim feelings amongst the community.
Recycling the myth
In March 2017, 9 months after the campaign had been debunked, the deputy leader of the Far-Right group, Britain First, tweeted a picture of the leaflet with the words: When the Muslim community feel empowered enough to distribute these leaflets, you know your country’s Islamic appeasement has gone too far!”
In September 2017, ultra-right wing anti-Muslim propaganda site, JewNews (no longer in existence) published an article about the PublicPurity leaflets, titled: Muslims DEMAND Locals Don’t Walk Dogs In Public Because It Is A Violation Of Sharia And “DISRESPECTS” Them. Again, well over a year after the campaign was debunked.
In April 2018 the claims appeared again on a Facebook page gaining tens of thousands of likes, comments and shares and lots of people getting angry at Muslims again.
And now, it seems, the “Muslims want to ban your dogs” rhetoric is being used again to drive division and Islamophobic anger.
In conclusion
This highlights how far disinformation can travel and how hard it sticks, despite being debunked just days after appearing.
It can feel futile, fighting this stuff. But we have to keep going – calling out the lies, standing up for the truth, and doing our part to push back against division and hatred.
I hope this has also given you a bit of an insight into debunking and some tips to follow next time you see a headline that is designed to trigger outrage against a particular group of people:
Quick tips for debunking outrage bait:
- If you see a screenshot, Google the headline. Cropping is often used to hide context — like dates or subheadings.
- Read the full article, not just the headline.
- Search for related stories for a broader context.
- Check trusted fact-checkers such as Snopes, FullFact, and Reuters Fact Check.
- Use archive.is to find deleted or altered pages. It’s a fantastic resource to see if articles and websites have been altered over time too.
- Always ask: who benefits from making me angry?
This article first appeared on Emma’s Substack: Monk Debunks and is reproduced here by kind permission.