Last Friday (15 Sept) the tweet below appeared regularly in my timeline.

Given that unpaid internships – along with zero-hour contracts and ‘disguised’ employment (Uber/Deliveroo etc) – are the big ethical no-nos in HR currently, it will not surprise you that the response to the tweet was much collective tutting on behalf of those in the profession (including me initially)
But something nagged at me. Whether it was the fact that the original tweet was not from one of the usual HR sources; or the fact that there was no link to the offending advert, merely a picture; or that I’m currently studying the “Calling Bullshit” online module; or as an HR person I’m used to carrying out disciplinary and grievance investigations and digging beneath the surface of issues. But mostly it was the fact that the story seemed too good to be true.
So, in my lunchbreak I did a little research. And in around 10 minutes – significantly less time than this post has taken to write – I discovered the following:
1. There is no such charity as “Fight Against Slavery”. No organisation of that name is currently registered or has been registered in the recent past with the Charity Commission (an essential requirement to describe yourself as a charity in the UK). Nor is any such organisation listed on the publicly available Police list of Anti-Slavery organisations.
2. There was a Crowdfunding page set up around a year ago with the aim of starting a charity under this name. It seems to have raised precisely no money at all.
3. The Daily Mail appears to have run a story on this in January this year. Given that newspaper’s reputation for playing fast and loose with facts, and its ability to twist any story to one of its political narratives (in this case “The HYPOCRISY of LEFTIES who tell US what to do while THEY do the opposite”), it’s possibly not a reliable source.
4. A quick bit of fact-checking on the Mail story reveals that the advert was allegedly placed on the Gumtree website, a general classified ads site that does include job adverts. At this distance of time there is no way of checking whether the advert was ever posted there.
5. The alleged spokesperson for the charity is one Chiara Chiavaroli. The only person listed on LinkedIn with this name is a Bologna University student, and while there are around 10 women with this name on Facebook, all also appear to live in Italy (Disclaimer – I didn’t check individual profiles). The crowdfunding page above lists a different organiser.
So, was this a prank to fool the Daily Mail, or an invented story to raise an issue of concern? Or is there some other explanation? What it certainly isn’t is a charity abusing its role or an example of an organisation exploiting people (since real charities can and do operate with volunteers, a situation which is both legally and ethically accepted). And it shows that even HR is not immune to the concept of fake news, something that we should all be aware of when commenting or retweeting stories related to the profession.