Were French President Emmanuel Macron and Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau planning on not telling American President Donald Trump where the afterparty was at the G-7 summit in Quebec? No, that's not true: the story was made up by a satirical website, it is not real.
The story originated from an article published by The Borowitz Report on June 8, 2018 titled "Macron, Trudeau Say They Weren't Going to Tell Trump Where G-7 Afterparty Was" (archived here) which opened:
LA MALBAIE, CANADA (The Borowitz Report)--Saying that they were "tremendously relieved" that Donald J. Trump is leaving the G-7 summit early, the leaders of France and Canada said on Friday that they had been planning not to tell Trump the location of the G-7 after party.
Speaking to reporters, Emmanuel Macron and Justin Trudeau said that there had been "total consensus" among non-U.S. participants to withhold information about the time, place, and existence of an after party from Trump.
"The plan was, if Trump asked about an after party, we were going to be, like, 'Ask Angela Merkel,' " Macron said. "Angela was going to totally stonewall him."
Users on social media only saw this title, description and thumbnail:
Macron, Trudeau Say They Weren't Going to Tell Trump Where G-7 Afterparty Was
"The plan was, if Trump asked about an afterparty, we were going to be, like, 'Ask Angela Merkel,' " Macron said.
The story actually appeared in the satire column of The New Yorker ("The Borowitz Report" by Andy Borowitz) which was acquired in 2012 by the magazine. Although the section with the columns and all the articles in it are clearly marked as satire the stories frequently get confused for real news by people who only see the title and summary on social media and who assume it must be real because the link goes to the actual website of The New Yorker. To them it would look somewhat like this, with an easy to miss "Not the news" being the only indication it is not real:
In part to combat this the main page of The Borowitz Report comes with a clear heading that simply states:
Satire from the Borowitz Report
To be safe, whenever you see a link that goes to any article on the "newyorker.com" website, always check if the rest of the link says "/humor/borowitz-report/" somewhere. If it does, don't believe a thing you read...
We wrote about newyorker.com before, here are our most recent articles that mention the site:
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