Claims circulating on social media in early 2025 purported to show an authentic screenshot of an article published by the politics and culture magazine The Atlantic, titled "A Rise in Sexual Assaults By Migrants is a Price Worth Paying to End Racism." The article in question was allegedly written by an author named Debbie Goldstein.
The image of the article shared on social media showed the headline along with a secondary headline that read "Quasi-consensual encounters between refugees and white western women may help with assimilation, says one Harvard academic," with no further text or hyperlink to the full piece.
The image circulated primarily on X (archived), with a variety of users (archived, archived) commenting on (archived, archived) the alleged article.
(@theblackspiderm/X)
However, the image was a fake. There was no evidence The Atlantic published this article, nor that Goldstein exists. The Atlantic itself has declared the image fraudulent.
"This is fake; it is not a screenshot of an actual Atlantic article. We have published no such thing. We have reported this as fake and as a trademark infringement," The Atlantic told Snopes via email. The magazine also published a public response on X (archived) condemning the fake headline. "For those who are sharing this image: it's remarkably easy to verify if something is real – or not – by visiting The Atlantic and searching our site."
An image is circulating with this fabricated headline. The Atlantic did not publish an article with the headline "A Rise in Sexual Assaults By Migrants is a Price Worth Paying to End Racism." pic.twitter.com/8FAi4YVlQg
— The Atlantic Communications (@TheAtlanticPR) April 17, 2025
Rather, the fake image appeared to have been first posted to X (archived) by the user @Nero, an account belonging to far-right figure Milo Yiannopoulos who was, at one time, banned from X (then known as Twitter). The bio section of @Nero's X page links to a website for Earhart Turner, which describes itself as a "boutique advisory firm," of which Yiannopoulos is listed as a senior partner. The original post had nearly 2,000 reposts, 14,000 "likes" and over 1.2 million views as of this writing. Snopes reached out to Yiannopoulos via email and he declined to comment on the fake headline.
The user responded to others commenting on the misleading post, including one response to a comment calling the purported news "insane," to which @Nero replied (archived), "I thought that when I made it up."
Additionally, the user responded to a since-deleted post that, from context, appeared to evoke questions about the alleged author, Goldstein, writing (archived), "That might prove challenging, as I made her up 15 minutes ago."
Indeed, a search for Debbie Goldstein on The Atlantic's website and Google yielded zero relevant results. More extensive searching did reveal a fiction author of cozy mystery novels named Debrah Goldstein, but she does not cite publication in The Atlantic on her official website. Further, a search for the alleged headline on The Atlantic's website and Google also yielded no relevant results.
For these reasons, we've rated this image purporting to be an authentic headline from The Atlantic as fake.
The Atlantic was founded in 1857 and the magazine's website describes the publication's "core principles" as "reason should always guide opinion; ideas have consequences, sometimes world-historical consequences; the knowledge we have about the world is partial and provisional, and subject to analysis, scrutiny, and revision."