A video of a light projection on Twitter's San Francisco office building featuring condescending messages targeting Elon Musk, is being shared online with a misleading claim that the stunt was pulled off by a disgruntled engineer at the micro-blogging site before quitting.
BOOM found the claim to be false. The video is of activist Alan Marling who projected a series of anti-Elon Musk comments on the Twitter's San Francisco office criticising several decisions made by him after taking over the company.
The messages called out Musk with scathing barbs such as "worthless billionaire", "insecure colonizer", "mediocre manchild" on the company's building wall.
The incident took place amid a situation when Musk is facing severe criticism for his decisions pertaining to the social media company and firing Twitter employees including the workers who took a step to criticise him. According to latest reports, Musk is considering laying off more Twitter employees after he downsized the company by half.
The video is being shared with a caption, "Twitter will probably crash and burn tonight (so sad)…but the last engineers out the door left Elon a parting message".
Click here to view the post.
Click here to view the post.
Fact Check
BOOM performed a keyword search related to the protest and found the same video was uploaded by NBC Bay Area journalist Gia Vang on November 18, 2022.
Vang wrote, "New projection on Twitter's headquarter building now by a guy who calls himself a projection activist."
Click here to view the tweet.
Taking a cue from her tweet, we ran a keyword search for "headquarter Twitter activist" and found a Los Angeles Times article carrying an interview of the activist named Alan Marling following the incident.
Speaking to publication, Marling said, "In this case, I was particularly concerned that Elon Musk has gone above and beyond, and below, other companies by firing its human rights staff, his diversity and inclusion staff and many of the moderators. I wanted to call that out and also his claim that he wanted to make Twitter a space of free speech."
Marling also admitted that he previously projected at Twitter in 2017 to enforce the site's hate speech policies and to stop them from the amplification of ex-US president Donald Trump's hate speech. However, the Bay Area activist denied commenting about his age or profession, as per the report.
We also found a news bulletin from WCNC Charlotte's official YouTube channel interviewing Alan Marling during the projections onto the Twitter headquarter criticising Musk. The interview can be seen from 35 seconds to 49 seconds in the video below.
In 2020, San Fransisco-based news outlet also posted a picture of Marling's projection where the activist protested about "freedom of speech" in a similar way.
Click here view the tweet.
BOOM reached out to activist Alan Marling to verify the viral claim. Marling debunked the claim and said, "I can confirm I have never been employed by Twitter, and I am the projection activist who shone those words on Twitter HQ."
He also sent us a video message about the same. It can be seen below.