An image shows a billboard poster in London asking people to “imagine a city less crowded” and telling them to “do your part” and “get sterilised”.
This poster did appear on a billboard in London in 2019. It was created by a street artist specialising in parodying corporate advertising and branding.
A post on Facebook appears to show a billboard poster saying, “Imagine a city less crowded…Do your part get sterilised! Yay!”
Above the photo, a caption read “Islington London, anyone got white paint?”
Some comments on the post question whether it’s genuine or was created using editing software.
The photo is genuine. The poster appeared on a billboard on Liverpool Road in Islington in 2019. Student newspaper Islington Now reported at the time that someone working locally said the poster was “there one day and gone the next”.
The poster appears to have been created by London-based street artist Huh?. According to Berlin’s street art and graffiti museum Urban Nation, he “is well-known for his practice of subvertising” which is “a political or social commentary that makes parodies of corporate advertisements and brands to convey an entirely new – often subversive – message”.
Close up images on the artist’s website show that one of the children in the poster has a t-shirt that says “no more sperm”, perhaps better indicating that the piece was meant to be satire. Full Fact contacted the artist for comment and will update this if he replies.
Although this image is real, we’ve previously fact checked the contents of a fake poster claiming to be from the NHS and an image of a billboard edited to add a fake quote from Diane Abbott MP. You can read our guide to fact checking false and misleading images here.
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 true because the photo is genuine but the poster reportedly appeared for a very short time in 2019 and was created by a street artist.
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