LAST MONTH, EVANGELICAL teacher Enoch Burke was jailed for the third time after trespassing at a school he used to work at.
While media coverage of Burke – who says he is protesting against “transgenderism” – has waned in Ireland since his imprisonment, there has been a surge of stories about him online recently in non-English spaces of the internet.
Social media posts, which have garnered tens of millions of views, have included false claims that the Irish state is arresting people for refusing to use people’s preferred pronouns — claims which had been pushed by Burke and his family, and even in some UK news outlets after his initial arrest in 2022.
On Facebook, Instagram, and most notably on X.com, The Journal has found posts in Arabic, Vietnamese, Russian, German, Czech, Italian, and Hungarian that have pushed false claims about Burke’s imprisonment.
More than a dozen of these posts conveying the exact same claims (including what appear to be invented quotes) appeared in different languages on Facebook and Instagram in a 24-hour period.
In 2022, Wilson’s Hospital School in Co Westmeath sought an injunction after Burke interrupted a church service held to mark the school’s 260th anniversary.
During that incident, Burke – who taught at the school – is alleged to have followed the principal around and to have loudly questioned her about a request she made for teachers to address a transgender student by their preferred pronouns.
The school initiated a disciplinary process against Burke over the incident, resulting in him being placed on paid administrative leave pending the outcome of the process.
However, when Burke continued to show up at the school, Wilson’s asked for a court order because its board claimed this was not abiding by the terms of his suspension and that he was disrupting the schools and its students.
Burke continued to turn up at Wilson’s, prompting the school to ask the courts to take further action; he was finally jailed for contempt of court in September 2022 when he turned up at the school for breaking yet another injunction.
Following this first arrest, some newspapers and social media posts claimed incorrectly that Burke had been arrested for refusing to call a transgender student at the school by their preferred pronoun.
Several articles and headlines did not convey that Burke was actually arrested for breaking an order given by the High Court to stay away from the school.
Some of these headlines have since been removed or amended, in some cases prompted by a factcheck article published by The Journal (though media coverage of the case since then has generally been more accurate).
Burke had been released from prison twice, both times without purging his contempt, when school was off because judges noted his potential presence would be less disruptive.
Last month, Enoch Burke was jailed for a third time over another refusal to comply with the court order, with an allegation by the school that he entered the school building to attend a staff meeting.
The courts have also been clear that Burke can purge his contempt by agreeing to stay away from the school.
In other words, he can choose to be freed from prison without having to accept transgender students or refer to anyone by their chosen pronouns.
Some English-language coverage of the case continues to incorrectly report that Burke was imprisoned for refusing to call a child by their preferred pronoun, though this appears to be largely restricted to social media posts and fringe blogs catering to evangelical Christians.
Some online commentators have tried to portray Burke as a principled upholder of his religious and civil rights, who has unjustly been jailed for refusing to speak against his beliefs.
While English speakers can readily find reliable coverage outlining how Burke was arrested after repeatedly trespassing at a school, his controversies have had huge coverage in many other languages.
In many social media posts, these include claims that the Irish state has jailed him for not using a student’s preferred pronoun.
An Arabic post on X on 1 September referenced the case, alongside a video re-shared from Enoch Burke’s own account.
“Four Irish police officers went to a teacher’s house to arrest him because he refused to use gay pronouns for trans students,” an automatic translation of the post reads.
The post, published by self-described Saudi social media influencer @Eyaaaad, has more than 12 million views, dwarfing the 2.1 million views on the post containing the video that was originally posted to Burke’s account.
Both Burke and the Saudi influencer’s accounts have paid-for verification, meaning that they may be eligible for X’s “revenue sharing” payouts that allow “verified” users to monetise their posts based on the number of impressions they make.
Another post on X by the same Saudi influencer, which was posted two days later and garnered a further 8.3 million views, said Burke was arrested after rejecting “homosexual ideas”.
Multiple other posts on X in Arabic, which have been seen tens or hundreds of thousands of times, have explicitly claimed that Burke was arrested for not calling a student by their preferred pronoun.
None of these bear a Community Note clarifying that such claims were false.
Community Notes are a scheme where contributors can submit comments on misleading tweets. It began shortly after X.com’s owner Elon Musk laid off much of the staff working of Trust and Safety efforts, though its implementation is inconsistent, and it has failed to stop X from becoming overrun with misinformation.
Posts making the same false claim about Burke refusing to use pronouns, or spreading another falsehood that he was arrested for refusing to teach children about homosexuality, have also been posted on Facebook and Instagram, where they have garnered more than 100,000 views.
Curiously, more than a dozen posts about Burke in multiple languages, including Vietnamese, Russian, German, Czech, Italian, and Hungarian, appear to be translated copies of each other and were posted within the same 24-hour period.
All these posts claimed Burke was arrested for refusing to use a student’s preferred pronouns and included the exact same information, including supposed quotes supposedly from the transgender student.
These quotes have never appeared in Irish media, nor has any interview with the student.
The earliest of this series of posts, published on 12 October to both Facebook and Instagram in Hungarian, shows a screenshot from the Telegram messaging app featuring the same text.
Translations of the long post begin: “A Christian teacher in Ireland has been jailed again and given an extended sentence for refusing to call a student ‘they’.”
However, there is not enough information in the screenshot to identify a channel it may have been posted in, and searches of Telegram by The Journal have not uncovered the original post.
The Facebook post featuring the Telegram screenshot had almost no interactions. However, the next day, the same message was posted by more than a dozen other accounts in multiple languages, where views reached into the hundreds and thousands.
There does not appear to be an obvious connection between these accounts, other than all of them posting near-identical messages in a 24-period which falsely claimed that Burke was imprisoned for refusing to use a student’s preferred pronouns.
Scrolling through previous posts shows that some appear to mostly post memes, or local news or, in multiple cases, pro-Putin propaganda.
“This is a piece of misinformation chain mail,” said Ciarán O’Connor, Senior Analyst at the Institute for Strategic Dialogue, a think-tank that studies disinformation.
O’Connor noted that some phrases in the posts appear to originate from an 11 October post on X by an Irish account that posts and shares far-right stories, memes, and arguments.
That post, in English, has 6.4 million views, though also has a Community Note saying that correctly explains that Burke was arrested for breaking a court order.
“What is clear is that this narrative falsely claims why Burke is imprisoned and, it appears, also includes fictitious quotes from the student at the centre of this issue,” O’Connor said.
“Despite the demonstrable false claims in this narrative, numerous versions of this narrative, in multiple languages, have been shared widely online with little or no clarifying information.
“This illustrates, once again, how serious platform failings in mitigating misinformation contribute to users being misinformation about events.”
The Journal’s FactCheck is a signatory to the International Fact-Checking Network’s Code of Principles. You can read it here. For information on how FactCheck works, what the verdicts mean, and how you can take part, check out our Reader’s Guide here. You can read about the team of editors and reporters who work on the factchecks here.
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