Viral image
Viral image
stated on February 25, 2021 in a Facebook post:

Photos show U.S. senators sleeping in the chamber.

False

Photos show UK Lords-a-sleeping, not US senators

If your time is short

  • Images of members of the House of Lords in the United Kingdom were wrongly described as showing sleeping U.S. senators.
 
See the sources for this fact-check

A proposal from Democratic lawmakers to raise the minimum wage to $15 per hour has been met by Republican resistance, but also some online misinformation.  

screenshot of a tweet that has been shared widely shows three photos of what looks like people sleeping through a legislative session. 

“If $15/hr is too much for minimum wage, then $85/hr is too much to pay our senators to literally do nothing,” the post says.

This post was flagged as part of Facebook’s efforts to combat false news and misinformation on its News Feed. (Read more about our partnership with Facebook.)

U.S. senators earn an annual salary of $174,000, or about $84 per hour based on a 40-hour work week. But the images in the tweet show members of the House of Lords, the upper house of Parliament in the United Kingdom — not American lawmakers.  

The images in the post can be found online with the context that they were taken in the Lords Chamber.

The original tweet describing these people as U.S. senators has been deleted. The account posted that it had mistakenly used images of the House of Lords.

We rate this post False. 

 
Our Sources

Instagram post, Feb. 25, 2021

Newsweek, Lindsey Graham offers ‘Waffle House’ plan to Dems worried about $15 minimum wage, March 4, 2021

U.S. Senate, Senate salaries (1789 to present), visited Feb. 5, 2021

The Sun, Lords a sleeping, June 6, 2018

Express, Unelected House of Lords told to stop falling asleep in memo on ‘RUDE’ behavior by peers, June 7, 2018

Paisley Independent, Silence of the Lords means reform is needed, Sept. 21, 2017

Tweet, Feb. 25, 2021