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Showbiz
Louis Staples
Apr 29, 2020
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Jennifer Saunders is someone who, even in the most divided times, most British people can agree that they quite like.
(And, as a side note, her rendition of "I Need a Hero" from Shrek 2 is a masterpiece that the world never appreciated for the High Art that it really is).
But now Saunders has found herself in a fake news controversy and has gone on Twitter to set the record straight.
What happened?
A post that defends the government’s role in the current shortage of PPE for the NHS, while also strongly criticising managers of the NHS, private care homes and local councils, wasshared on Facebook.
The post claims to have been written by Jennifer Saunders, and was shared by a fan page.
But it turns out that this is all a load of rubbish (who’d have guessed it?)
Saunders was quick to clarify that the post was not written by her, tweeting:
It turns out that the post was actually shared by the ‘Jennifer Saunders Fans’ Facebook page, which isn’t the “official” Jennifer Saunders Facebook page that she mentioned in her tweet. That account hasn’t posted anything since 2015.
So where did it come from?
The ‘Jennifer Saunders Fans’ Facebook page said in a statement that they did share the post, but did not write it nor attribute it to the comedian.
They think that someone took the post from their page and then attributed it to Jennifer Saunders, thinking the page was run by her and she wrote the post. They’ve now deleted the post.
It’s not yet clear who wrote the post, seeing as there are several versions of the Facebook post that include the same text, but don’t attribute the words to the ‘Ab Fab’ star.