Did Taylor Swift cancel "red state shows" after President-elect Donald Trump won the 2024 general election? No, that's not true: This first appeared on social media in a post on Facebook with "satire" in the caption. Plus, the Facebook account that posted the information says in its bio that it shares satire and parody content. The article the post was based on was also identified as "satire."
The claim appeared in a post on Facebook on November 9, 2024. The caption and a text overlay read:
Taylor Swift Cancels Red State Shows After MASSIVE RED WAVE, 'I Won't Be Performing Here Anymore' - SATIRE
This is what the post looked like on Facebook at the time of writing:
(Source: Facebook screenshot taken Mon Nov 11 09:16:24 2024 UTC)
The Patriots Lovers account, which posted the claim, included in the post caption that it was "Satire." Its page is also self-described as "Satire/Parody" on Facebook.
The first comment on the post featured a link to the original article about Swift's purported cancellations. The article, published on November 9, 2024, appeared on a website called SpaceXMania (archived here). The first topic tag below the headline read "SATIRE." This is what the tag, highlighted in red by Lead Stories, looked like at the time of writing:
(Source: SpaceXMania screenshot taken Mon Nov 11 21:46:12 2024 UTC)
The SpaceXMania website About Us section (archived here) notes they publish "fake news":
Welcome to our website, owned and operated by Funky Productions LLC. We are a team of writers and editors based in New York, USA. Our mission? To bring you the freshest fake news, some sassy analysis, and a good dose of satire, all rolled into one crazy concoction that orbits around Elon Musk and everything that's lighting up the viral/trending charts.
Even so, some posts, including one on Instagram Threads (archived here), reposted the SpaceXMania article's content as authentic without including the "Satire" disclaimer.
Lead Stories searched Google News' archive of thousands of reliable media publications for key phrases such as, "This is a personal and painful choice" (archived here) and "I simply can't perform in states where those values aren't upheld" (archived here). The results yielded dozens of unrelated articles, none supporting the SpaceXMania article's authenticity.
Additional Lead Stories fact checks on false claims involving Taylor Swift can be found here.
Other Lead Stories articles on claims concerning SpaceXMania are here.
