Right-wing social media accounts are now circulating a counterfeit tweet that was supposedly posted and then deleted by Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY), allegedly calling for an extension of business closures — not from the coronavirus pandemic, but in order to defeat President Donald Trump in the November election.
The fraudulent tweet appears to have just begun spreading on Tuesday, based on a Twitter search, as well as a quick look at posts on Facebook and Instagram. Interestingly enough, the supposed screen grab depicts the message as having been posted over a month ago, on May 20, and to have been retweeted over 25,000 times — and yet, nobody seems to have learned of it until today.
Snopes quickly debunked the claim:
This tweet image was a fabrication, however, and not something posted by Ocasio-Cortez. It does not appear in her Twitter timeline, nor was it recorded by databases that capture and preserve deleted tweets.
Moreover, although the tweet was supposedly “shared over 20,000 times,” we could find no instances whatsoever of the original tweet’s having been shared or commented upon at all. It exists only as a screenshot of a faux tweet posted to a private Facebook group.
But right-wing media voices have continued to push a conspiracy theory that the severity of the coronavirus pandemic is a hoax meant to hurt Trump’s reelection chances by damaging the economy, and this latest forgery of an Ocasio-Cortez tweet will feed into that message.
On the June 23 edition of The Rush Limbaugh Show, the eponymous radio host read the fake tweet aloud and claimed that “a lot of governors are paying attention to her.” (Limbaugh has previously accused “the Democrat hierarchy” of ordering governors to shut down their states’ economies.)
Another individual who reposted the fake tweet was right-wing commentator Mark Levin, who hosts a weekly TV show on Fox News as well his own radio and online shows. Levin remarked, “AOC let the cat out of the bag!” but subsequently deleted his tweet. (Way back in February, Levin said that COVID-19 was just an example of the Democrats creating “health scares” in order to gain political advantage.)
The fake tweet was also shared by Jessi Melton, a Republican congressional candidate in Florida who is among those running for Congress who have lent credence to or supported the QAnon conspiracy theory.
It might also be worth pointing out that the purported Ocasio-Cortez tweet exhibited the kind of irregular capitalization often employed by Trump — perhaps inspiring his devotees to do the same — rather than what is typically found on the representative’s own account.
