There is no shortage of real stories that solidify the "Florida Man" meme's place in internet culture, and a widely circulating headline about a man's supposed arrest in the Sunshine State claims to the latest addition to the catalog.
“Florida man arrested for using a lost US nuke to power his home for more than 27 years,” reads the purported CNN headline on an image posted to Instagram on Nov. 15.
The image includes a mugshot and an underwater photo of a man in scuba gear next to the supposed nuclear weapon. The post received more than 6,000 likes in two days.
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But a spokesperson for CNN told USA TODAY the image is fabricated and CNN wrote no such story. Both photos used in the Instagram post are several years old.
USA TODAY reached out to the user who shared the image for comment.
The purported headline does not appear on CNN’s website, and the network confirmed no such article ever existed.
“This image is fabricated and was not reported by CNN,” spokesperson Sydney Baldwin told USA TODAY.
The mugshot in the image stems from a 2016 arrest in New York – not a more recent one in Florida. It was included in several media reports of a 55-year-old man arrested on suspicion of harassing a woman at an Albany, New York, bus stop.
The underwater image...
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