Bud Light and its parent company, Anheuser-Busch InBev, have faced backlash from conservative beer drinkers since a recent partnership with transgender social media influencer Dylan Mulvaney.
There’s been plenty of misinformation spread about the reaction to the partnership, including a false claim that the company’s CEO resigned.
An April 29 Facebook post claimed the company had to close half of its U.S. breweries over the controversy, costing 20,000 people their jobs. The claim originated on an article on a satirical website, but portions of it were republished in an article on a laptop review website, without a disclaimer.
The post was flagged as part of Meta’s efforts to combat false news and misinformation on its News Feed. (Read more about our partnership with Meta, which owns Facebook and Instagram.)
Mulvaney, who is known for documenting her transition on TikTok, where she has nearly 11 million followers, announced a Bud Light contest during the NCAA basketball tournament in a video she posted to Instagram on April 1. She showed a commemorative can Bud Light sent her with her face on it, which the company said is not for public sale.
Bud Light has faced calls for boycotts, including by singers Travis Tritt and Kid Rock. Sales of the beer have fallen and two marketing executives are taking leaves of absence, according to news reports. However, we found no evidence in a search of news articles on Google and Nexis that any of the company’s breweries have shut down as a result.
Anheuser-Busch’s website lists 12 breweries across the country: Two in California and one each in New Jersey, New York, Georgia, Ohio, Colorado, Texas, Florida, New Hampshire, Virginia and Missouri.
We looked at the same page using the Internet Archive Wayback Machine; on Jan. 16, the page shows the same number of breweries. There are no press releases announcing any closures on its website, either.
Anheuser-Busch CEO Brendan Whitworth posted an April 13 letter that didn’t mention the Mulvaney partnership, but said, “We never intended to be part of a discussion that divides people. We are in the business of bringing people together over a beer.” He didn’t lament any closed breweries.
The company describes its St. Louis brewery, which opened in the 1850s, as its flagship brewery where more than 30 of its brands are brewed, including Bud Light. There is no mention of it closing on the company website.
There are other clues that the article, published on a laptop review website, is not legitimate. It quotes a Joe Barron, which it calls the “vice president of Bud Light.” No one by that name is on the company’s leadership page.
The name is commonly used on a satirical website network called America’s Last Line of Defense, which describes itself as a “network of parody, satire, and tomfoolery.”
We found an article in the network’s Patriot Party Press making the same claim and using the Barron name, as well as some of the same wording.
The article on the laptop site also uses phrases that one would be hard-pressed to find in a legitimate news story. “Most of these breweries are union shops, so this news is double the lib ownage,” it said. Another line read, “Unfortunately, these numbers have not been verified, but we will continue to report them until proven otherwise.”
For readers who may take the claim seriously because the laptop review website carries no satire disclaimer, we rate the claim Pants on Fire!
