Bud Light partnered with a transgender social media influencer for a promotion during the NCAA March Madness tournament. Social media users responded with the false claim that the CEO of the company had resigned following a conservative backlash to the partnership. The claim originated in a fabricated article on a satirical website.
Anheuser-Busch, the parent company of Bud Light beer, enlisted transgender performer and social media influencer Dylan Mulvaney to promote Bud Light during the annual NCAA March Madness basketball tournament.
The move caused an uproar from some conservative consumers, including musician Kid Rock, who posted a video of himself shooting packages of Bud Light.
The backlash spread to social media, where posts falsely claimed that the CEO of Anheuser-Busch had resigned because of the fallout.
“Anheuser Busch CEO Resigns As Bud Light Sales Plummet To Record Low,” read the headline of a bogus article on the website topnewsz35.com.
A post on Facebook included a screenshot of an article with the same text but a different publishing date. “CEO Augustus Anheuser III left the corporate headquarters in shame after tendering his resignation,” the article said.
The claims originated on a satirical website, the Dunning-Kruger Times, which describes itself as “a subsidiary of the ‘America’s Last Line of Defense’ network of parody, satire, and tomfoolery.”
“Everything on this website is fiction,” the website says on its “about us” page.
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