Photographs show the aftermath of an Asda staff member throwing a bucket of water over a homeless person.
Asda has confirmed that a staff member was watering plants behind where the person was sitting and that the incident happened in 2018.
A Facebook post falsely claims to show photographs of the aftermath of an Asda staff member throwing a bucket of water over a homeless person. The post, which appeared on 12 April and has over 3,600 shares, says: “Homeless man has a large bucket of water thrown over him at Asda Bolton by staff GET SHARED!! [sic]”.
It shows several photos of a man sitting in a stream of water outside the front of an Asda store.
However, a spokesperson for Asda told Full Fact that a staff member was actually watering plants kept outside the store, which are visible behind where the man is sitting.
They said that “it is not the case that an Asda colleague threw water” over someone. They explained that a staff member had been “watering plants which are kept outside” and so water “flowed” towards where the person was sitting.
The spokesperson also confirmed that the incident took place in 2018, rather than being recent as the post suggests. At the time, the Asda Service Team on Twitter said: “I do believe there's been a slight misunderstanding as CCTV shows our colleague watering the flowers around the front of the store. The suggestion that she internationally threw water over someone isn’t correct.”
Although the man appears to have been left sitting on wet ground as a result of the plants being watered, there is no evidence that he had “a large bucket of water thrown over him” as the Facebook post claims.
Furthermore, we do not know the identity of the man in the photos and have not been able to verify whether he was homeless when they were taken.
Full Fact has written about false claims relating to Asda before, including that their tills have facial recognition and that their own brand milk is not suitable for vegetarians.
Image courtesy of Sionk
This article is part of our work fact checking potentially false pictures, videos and stories on Facebook. You can read more about this—and find out how to report Facebook content—here. For the purposes of that scheme, we’ve rated this claim as false because Asda has confirmed that a staff member was watering the plants and that the incident took place in 2018.
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