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Wednesday, Mar. 31, 2021

Did the CEO of Coca-Cola say boycotters are ‘a few right winged nuts’?

Dana Ford, Lead Stories
no

There's no publicly available evidence that Coca-Cola CEO James Quincey ever said that. A spokesman for Coca-Cola said the quote in a social media post is fabricated.

The false post was likely inspired by a controversy. In February 2021, images of slides, reportedly from Coca-Cola online racism training for staff, became public. The slides urged staff to "try to be less white."

Coca-Cola responded to the controversy in a statement dated March 2, 2021, stressing that the content, available through its training platform, was not part of its training curriculum. The statement read, it part:

"We apologize to those who were offended by this content. We would never encourage anyone to be any less of themselves."

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Fact briefs are bite-sized, well-sourced explanations that offer clear "yes" or "no" answers to questions, confusions, and unsupported claims circulating online. They rely on publicly available data and documents, often from the original source. Fact briefs are written and published by Gigafact contributor publications.

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Lead Stories is a fact checking and debunking website at the intersection of big data and journalism that launched in 2015. It scouts for trending stories, images, videos and posts that contain false information in order to fact check them as quickly as possible. It actively monitors the fake-news ecosystem and doesn’t wait for reader tips or reports before getting started on a story.

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