Were NFL referees given authority to disqualify football players who kneeled during the U.S. national anthem? No, that's not true: The claim is from a satirical website whose articles Lead Stories has debunked before. Lead Stories found no actual news articles mentioning such change to the authority of NFL referees.
The claim appeared in a post on Facebook (archived here) on August 19, 2024. The caption read:
NFL Referees were given the authority to disqualify players for anthem kneeling.So far they've tossed five of them.'The league isn't tolerating it anymore.'Full story in comment 👇
This is what the post looked like on Facebook at the time of writing:
(Source: Facebook screenshot taken on Tue Aug 20 14:03:13 2024 UTC)
In the upper right corner of the image with the claim is a watermark that reads, "AMERICA'S LAST LINE OF DEFENSE." Lead Stories found the full article about the claim on dunning-kruger-times.com, a satirical site that is part of the America's Last Line Of Defense (ALLOD) network (archived here). That article claims the supposed new rule "went into effect the first week of the season" while the opening of the NFL 2024 regular season was more than two weeks away at the time of writing.
Lead Stories searched on Google News, visible here, with key words from the claim post but found no proof to corroborate the claim (archived here).
We have reached out to the NFL and will update this article when a response is received.
A reverse image search (archived here) of the image in the claim led us to news articles from October 9, 2022, about a Buffalo Bills player ejected from a game for elbowing a referee.
About ALLOD
"America's Last Line of Defense" network is run by self-professed liberal troll Christopher Blair from Maine along with a loose confederation of friends and allies. He runs several websites and Facebook pages with visible satire disclaimers everywhere. They mostly publish made-up stories with headlines specifically created to trigger Republicans, conservatives and evangelical Christians into angrily sharing or commenting on the story on Facebook without actually reading the full article, exposing them to mockery and ridicule by fans of the sites and pages.
Every site in the network has an about page that reads (in part):
Everything on this website is fiction. It is not a lie and it is not fake news because it is not real. If you believe that it is real, you should have your head examined. Any similarities between this site's pure fantasy and actual people, places, and events are purely coincidental and all images should be considered altered and satirical. See above if you're still having an issue with that satire thing.
Reuters and Snopes have fact checked this claim as well.
Other Lead Stories fact checks on claims concerning the NFL are here.
