Several social media users have been reposting a tweet saying the registrar’s office at the University of Oxford put up signage to address persistent questions on the educational attainment of presidential candidate Ferdinand “Bongbong” Marcos Jr. from the institution. The tweet is satirical.
The Feb. 5 post by the Twitter account Philippine Daily Sun carried a photo of a building with an inset of a signage that reads: “No more questions about F. Marcos Jr. allowed. No, he did not graduate here.”
There is no truth to the claim that such a statement was put up at any Oxford building.
Philippine Daily Sun represents itself as “the Nation’s Greatest News Source” but explicitly states on its page that it is a satire account.
Despite the disclaimer, 10 netizens and the Facebook (FB) page Women Fighting Back Coalition (created on Oct. 25, 2016) published from Feb. 5 to Feb. 8 a screenshot of Philippine Daily Sun’s tweet without identifying it as satire. These collectively got a total of 628 interactions.
Some FB users in the comment sections believed the claim, while others called it “fake” or correctly pointed out that it was “satire.”
A reverse image search shows that the original photo of a grand building shown in the tweet is the university’s All Souls College, used by graduate students, posted on April 15, 2014, on Wikimedia Commons.
Meanwhile, the signage was digitally altered and overlaid with text. The original photo, posted on Oct. 26, 2016, was on the stock photography provider iStock by Getty Images’ website.
The satirical tweet and its screenshots emerged after Marcos reiterated in a Feb. 5 interview on GMA Network’s DZBB radio station that he obtained a diploma for a degree course from the university.
However, a university official sent an email to VERA Files Fact Check to confirm that Marcos did not complete his degree and was only awarded a Special Diploma in Social Studies in 1978. The diploma is not equivalent to a full graduate diploma.
(READ: VERA FILES FACT CHECK: SMNI News wrongly claims Marcos earned ‘bachelor’s degree’ from Oxford)
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