In mid-May 2026, posts appeared on social media sites such as Facebook and Instagram claiming to show letters from governors in several different states, including Alabama, Mississippi, South Carolina, Tennessee and Virginia, announcing a ban on line dances including the "Cha-Cha Slide" and "Cupid Shuffle."
Violators would face fines between $100 and $500, "depending on crowd size and repeat offenses," according to the posts.
Snopes readers searched the site asking whether the announcements of the "Footloose"-esque bans on dancing were real or fake.
We found no evidence that the laws were real. Instead, we found evidence that some of the images were generated using artificial intelligence tools. Accordingly, we have rated the claim fake.
We reached out to the governors' offices of the states that supposedly enacted the ban. Spokespeople for Mississippi Gov. Tate Reeves and South Carolina Gov. Henry McMaster both responded confirming they had not passed such bans. We had not heard back from representatives for Alabama, Tennessee and Virginia at time of publication.
To check whether the announcements were real, we first ran an image of the letter through Google's reverse image search to verify whether it had been published with any legitimate reporting on the supposed laws. We found nothing, suggesting the bills were fake.
Next, we checked LegiScan, which tracks bills introduced in Congress and all 50 states. The images all claimed that the legislation in question was House Bill 417, so we searched the relevant state houses for bills with that number.
In Alabama, HB 417 was about the "purchase and installation of playground equipment by public K-12 schools."
In Mississippi, HB 417 was a failed effort to add five new drugs to the state's controlled-substances list.
In South Carolina, HB 417 did not exist.
In Tennessee, HB 417 attempts to lengthen the timeline for paying a fee to the state related to the monitoring of financial transfers.
In Virginia, HB 417 aims to expand in-state tuition at the state's public universities to children of active-duty service members or veterans who have lived in the state for four years (instead of the current 10 years).
Another indication that the letters were fake was that they all used the same language, which would be unlikely for the governors of five states to do.
Finally, we noticed that some of the letters contained common signs of AI generation, such as the state seal on the Mississippi (the second "o" in "governor" is garbled) and South Carolina (a number of garbled letters) versions of the bill.
This is not the first time Snopes has reported on fake legislation announcements that turned out to be generated by artificial intelligence. We previously debunked fake images claiming four states had banned "aimless driving."