Twitter Lies Haunt Lindsay Lohan

Celebrities have long played an active role in charitable works and they frequently speak out for social causes, even while the more cynical observer might suggest that much of this apparent good will is for show, fame and personal publicity, rather than out of altruism. Lindsay Lohan almost certainly gave fodder to those who scorn Hollywood and celebrity culture, by misleading her Twitter followers about how she saved more than three dozen children from the grimy world of human trafficking in India. The only problem for Lohan was that shortly after she sent out a tweet telling her Twitter followers about these latest good deed, it turned out that she did not even visit India at the time, let alone save 40 children from trafficking.

According to Lindsay Lohan‘s tweet, she was travelling to India last week to start working on a BBC documentary and ended up “saving” some 40 kids during an anti-trafficking raid lasting nearly five hours. The only problem is that a non-governmental organization based in India found out about Lohan’s claims on Twitter and immediately asserted that the American actress and the BBC were not even present when the trafficking raid took place in New Delhi. In fact, Lohan was probably not even in the country at the time—she was likely just about to board her plane, en route to India. The BBC quickly intervened, so as to ensure that this story which spread through Twitter would not damage its efforts at creating a documentary. The media giant pointed out that Lohan did not actually claim to be physically present when the raid took place. This may be true, but with Lohan’s tweet talking about how “over 40 children [were] saved so far, within one day’s work,” and how it is far preferable to do this than answer tabloid critics, it is not nefarious to take this misleading post to mean that the actress herself claimed to have saved dozens of children in a twenty-four hour period.