Viral stories have a tendency to omit the fact-checking process. In the digital age, stories spread like wildfire and the only thing required is a few retweets here and there for the world to know about it. As such, a story surrounding finger-licking good KFC spread through Twitter. The latter consisted of a South African student, who claimed to have allegedly conned KFC out of free food for a year. Precisely, the student alleges he was able to successfully fool numerous locations of the chicken-frying franchise into believing he was a quality inspector hired by its headquarters. Evidently, social media took that story, ran and thoroughly enjoyed flaming KFC to burnt bits. Moreover, the story spread as far as CBS News.
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Since then, KFC has come forward to debunk the tale. A spokesperson confirmed in a statement that the story was purely fabricated. The company's "strict operational processes" would have never allowed it to happen. Furthermore, the communique adds: "Any unauthorized individuals posing as KFC team members in our restaurants and head office would have been picked up immediately." KFC also shared the news via social media, in a series of tweets which denounced the story as fake.
Hence, the moral of the story is: don't always believe what you see on social media.