Did Bad Bunny and other famous people including Blake Shelton, Cardi B, Tom Jones, Andrea Bocelli say that they were supporting peaceful demonstrators via the National Defense Fund? No, that's not true: The claim was an example of so-called "Viet Spam" campaigns of nearly identical made-up clickbait stories, each featuring a different famous person, created to drive traffic to web pages based overseas, often in Vietnam. The fake stories are then shared by social media users who are misled into believing they are real.
The claim appeared in a March 29, 2026, post on Facebook account @ArtistUniverse (archived here). It opened:
BREAKING: Global Latin Superstar Bad Bunny Announces Support for Peaceful Demonstrators via National Defense Fund
This is what the post looked like on Facebook at the time of writing:
(Image source: post by @ArtistUniverse on Facebook.)
There is no evidence that global Latin superstar Bad Bunny ever said that he was supporting the ongoing "No Kings" protests by committing to participating in a "National Defense Fund." Had the international singer made such a statement, it would have been major news. Lead Stories searched Google News (archived here) and Yahoo! News (archived here) and did not find any matching reports.
The Facebook account making the claim about Bad Bunny, @ArtistUniverse (archived here), is managed from Vietnam, according to the Meta transparency data. Here is a screenshot of the transparency page:
(Image source: transparency tab for Facebook page @ArtistUniverse.)
The post includes a link to a website (archived here) filled with pop-ups that claims Bad Bunny made the announcement that he is supporting the "No Kings" peaceful protests but it does not offer any evidence to support the claim.
Here is the list of famous people with the quote attributed to them on Facebook as of publication date:
- Bad Bunny
- Cardi B
- Pink
- Celine Dion
- Blake Shelton
- Lainey Wilson
- GloRilla
- Andrea Bocelli
- Brandon Lake
- Jelly Roll
- Tom Jones
The type of the claim, its copied-and-pasted language, and the way it spread fit the pattern of what Lead Stories has identified as "Viet Spam" -- social media campaigns to generate traffic for made-for-advertising pages (archived here) that rely on shocking headlines about celebrities coming from websites pretending to be news outlets. Lead Stories has published dozens of debunks highlighting the prevalence of such schemes on Facebook.
Lead Stories published a primer on how to identify these kinds of fake posts exported from Vietnam. It's titled "Prebunk: Beware Of Fake Fan Pages Spreading False Stories About Your Favorite Celebrities -- How To Spot 'Viet Spam'".
