Around the time of the last election, and the outbreak of Ebola in Africa, Steffan Browning shared a petition on Facebook suggesting that homeopaths should be sent to Africa to help treat Ebola. At the time he claimed that the posting of the link on Facebook was an automatic thing. I never bought that argument. I tried using the same petition site, and the posting to Facebook was always a opt in step. But laying out the argument in text was too difficult.
I mention this because it looks like Steffan might be being economical with the truth about his social media again. During John Key’s valedictory speech Steffan Browning posted the following photo:
With the caption:
Thought John Key might like a little bit more blood for his valedictory speech, the day that we get confirmation of the raid he approved was responsible for innocent civilian deaths. Disgusting legacy!
Needless to say this was not taken well by many on the right. Chris Bishop, and Jenna Raeburn both tweeted about it:
Unsurprisingly this also got picked up by the media, with NewsHub running a story last night about it. In the story NewsHub claim that it was only posted on Steffan’s personal profile, not his MP verified page.
However, if you look closely at the profile pictures in the top left of the NewsHub photo and the photo posted by Chris Bishop, they don’t match:
The profile photo in the image that Bishop posted matches with the name and profile of Staffan’s verified MP’s page:
So unlike NewsHub reported, Steffan posted the image and comment to both his Facebook profile AND his verified Facebook page. NewsHub may have just missed the page post.
At some point during the evening Steffan deleted the post from his verified Facebook page, and has either told the party Chief of Staff that it is gone, or has done nothing to correct her belief that it had been taken done. She has publicly tweeted that it is gone:
However the post was still up on his Facebook profile, and publicly available:
In fact, even as the Green’s Chief of Staff was publicly stating to someone that the post was down, it was still up. So once again Steffan allows people speaking on behalf of the party to make claims that are demonstrably untrue, either by lying to them, or failing to correct them.
The photo was still up on Steffan’s profile around midnight last night. However it was taken down before 7:30am. Though I still stand by my expressed view that Steffan has either willfully, or by omission, told fibs about where it was posted.
I shall leave the final observation to Jeremy (@nz_voter):
