Caption of the photo of the British aircraft carrier battle group: MISLEADING
Three old photos of the British carrier battle group were posted on a Facebook page, along with a claim that the naval formation had recently deployed to the South China Sea. This is old news.
The two posts with the photos published on June 15th had the following headline:
“The strongest British aircraft carrier battle group is gathering in the South China Sea”
This is misleading. It was only in 2021 that the British government sent the aircraft carrier HMS Queen Elizabeth to the South China Sea as part of a carrier battle group. The aim of the exercise was to strengthen the British government’s presence in the Indo-Pacific region.
On June 2, the British Defense Journal reported that HMS Queen Elizabeth was undergoing lengthy repairs in a dry dock in Rosyth, Scotland.
The results of the reverse image search and the image metadata show that the photos used in the article were taken on October 4, 2020, during the carrier battle group’s participation in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) Group Exercise 2020.
The carrier battle group, consisting of nine ships, 15 fighter jets, eleven helicopters and 3,000 soldiers from Great Britain, the USA and the Netherlands, conducted exercises in the North Sea.
The two misleading posts from the FB page The rebirth of the military received 1,475 reactions, 469 comments and 68 shares. These appeared on the same day that the Chinese coast guard issued a regulation detaining foreigners in the disputed South China Sea.
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(Editor’s note: VERA Files partners with Facebook to combat the spread of disinformation. Learn more about this partnership and our methodology.)
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