Did Former South Korean President Moon Jae-in ask the government to build a restroom for his private bookstore? No, that's not true: The claim appeared without supporting evidence in an article by one partisan online site. A quote included in the article attributed to the bookstore has been denied as a fabrication by the bookstore's social media account.
The claim appeared in a video (archived here) where it was published by @jayusiseon on Tiktok on May 5, 2023 with a caption that reads:
Moon asked local government to build restroom for his own business, even though he has plenty of money and has earned even more.
This is what the post looked like on TikTok at the time of writing:
(Source: TikTok screenshot taken on Sun May 28 16:19:44 2023 UTC)
The video claimed that according to an article by far-right online site 'Pen n Mike', former president Moon, who recently opened a small bookstore called 'Pyeongsanbooks' nearby his house in Yangsan, asked the local government to build restrooms for his bookstore business.
The article provided an alleged quote from the bookstore's Facebook account saying,
our visitors and neighbors expect the problem (no restroom or parking spaces) will be solved by local authorities, not Moon himself.
In a release on May 6, the bookstore's official Instagram account dismissed the claim and the article by 'Pen n Mike' as groundless. The post claims:
The news article that showed up on the media (Pen n Mike) is groundless. We did not post or erase the remarks shown in the article on the Pyeongsanbooks Facebook account. Since the article by 'Pen n Mike' is the only story released about the issue, it is clearly targeting us
