Fact check: Angry tantrum video of man at airport kicked off plane for rejecting mask policy, not because of the Capitol uprising



[ad_1]

Why did the 18-second video go so viral? Partly because someone on Twitter – not the person who actually recorded the video – added a caption suggesting the man was put on a no-fly list for participating in the U.S. Capitol uprising .

“People who broke into the Capitol on Wednesday now learn they are on no-fly lists pending full investigation. They are not happy with this,” the tweeter, which goes by the handle @RayRedaced, said in the legend.

Facts first: The Twitter caption was inaccurate: The airport incident was not about the Capitol uprising. Rather, the man in the video was asked to get off a Charlotte-Denver flight for refusing to comply with American Airlines’ mandatory mask policy, airline spokesman Curtis Blessing said. at CNN.

“On Friday January 8, a customer was asked to disembark flight 1754 at Charlotte Douglas International Airport (CLT) for refusing to comply with our mandatory facial coverage policy. The customer complied with disembarkation requests and the flight took off at 7:42 pm EST for Denver International Airport (DEN), ”Blessing said in an email.

After the mask incident, Blessing said, the man was placed on American Airlines’ own deny list, essentially an airline-specific no-fly list, pending further investigation. But there is no evidence to suggest that he was ever on a government no-fly list – in which case it would have been highly unlikely that he could have boarded a plane at all – or banned from flying for any reason. is. linked to the Capitol uprising.

The video was originally posted to social media app TikTok by Tania Domínguez, who told CNN she was at Charlotte Airport waiting for a different flight. His own caption read: “Homeboy had a complete collapse at the toddler level because he was told to wear a mask.” (She later said in the TikTok comment thread attached to her video that she wasn’t sure the incident involved masks. But her initial instinct turned out to be correct.)

The video shows the man walking through the terminal with a face covering his chin rather than his nose and mouth. He looks moved as he screams at being kicked off a plane and allegedly being the victim of anonymous people he claimed to want to ruin his life.

CNN was unable to make contact with the man, whose name has not been made public.

After CNN reported on Twitter on Tuesday that the @RayRedoted tweet incorrectly suggested the incident concerned the Capitol uprising, @RayRedoted tweeted a correction and said, “I was initially given incorrect information”. At 3:50 p.m. Tuesday, the correction tweet had 20 retweets – compared to over 107,000 retweets on the original inaccurate tweet, which remained live.

Not the only one

This Charlotte video wasn’t the only airport video to go viral with a fake caption in the wake of the Capitol uprising. Videos of an arrest incident at Fort Lauderdale-Hollywood International Airport in Florida, for example, have been widely shared with tags claiming they are also linked to the insurgency and a “#NoFlyList” – but as the Tampa Bay Times pointed out, the videos were filmed two months ago.
Congressional Democrats, including Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, have called on participants in the Capitol Hill uprising to be put on the government’s no-fly list. But it is not known what action, if any, is being taken. The office of House Homeland Security President Bennie Thompson, a Democrat from Mississippi who last week asked the FBI and the Transportation Security Administration to add all identified rioters on Capitol Hill to the federal no-fly list, said Monday he had not received any update that the agencies did.
The TSA said in a statement Monday that it was on “high alert” following the Capitol incident and that “travelers will notice additional law enforcement and canine presence at all three Washington area airports. , DC “.

CNN’s Pete Muntean contributed to this article.



[ad_2]

Source link