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Reporting
On April 8 2021, Imgur user “superscout0233” shared the following meme with a fakeout ending, initially stating that “under [Joseph] Stalin,” the Soviet Union’s gulags held 22 percent of the world’s prison population before adding text indicating that statistic was not about the Soviet Union but was, in fact, true for the United States in 2021:
The Post
Above and beneath a propaganda-poster style image of Stalin, text read:
Under Stalin, repression was so severe that Soviet Gulags held 22% of the world’s entire prison population
Just kidding, that’s in the United States today
That post was simply titled “Oppression,” and it did not include any contextual information about Stalin-era Soviet gulags or the United States’ rate of incarceration in 2021. The discussion in the comments took issue with its perceived faint praise of Stalin in comparison, with some claiming that Soviet gulags and American prisons were “apples and oranges.”