What was claimed
Tennis pro Serena Williams wrote a post saying she is “sick of COVID-19” and sick of “black vs. white”.
Our verdict
This is incorrect, the post was shared by someone also called Serena Williams, but not the tennis player.
This Facebook post isn’t by tennis player Serena Williams
30 June 2020
Several people have shared a screenshot of a Facebook post from a Facebook user called Serena Williams, assuming it to be from the US tennis pro.
Some have incorrectly directly linked the post to the tennis player by adding “@serenawilliams nailed it”, which is the social media handle of the 23-time Grand Slam singles champion.
The post begins:
“I’m sick of COVID-19. I’m sick of black vs. white. I’m sick of Democrats vs. Republicans. I’m sick of gay vs. straight. I’m sick of Christians vs atheists. I’m REALLY sick of the media.”The post was shared by someone called Serena Williams, but not the athlete. The ‘intro’ on this person’s Facebook page says: “Nope, not THAT Serena Williams”.
The original Facebook post can be seen here.
If you scroll down the athlete’s Facebook page, you can see no similar post. And the profile picture in the viral screenshot does not match any on the tennis player’s page. It seems to be a blurry version of the Facebook user’s old profile picture.
It also appears that this other Serena Williams did not originally write the text in the post. Fact checker Snopes found a version of it dating back to earlier in the month.
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 partly false because tennis player Serena Williams did not write this post.