I seem to remember a 2020 tweet recently by DJT…
coincidence?
JUST IN: Twitter suspends account that helped IGNITE fury over Covington Catholic MAGA students
The account, with the username @2020fight, was set up in December 2016 and appeared to be the tweets of a woman named Talia living in California. “Teacher & Advocate. Fighting for 2020,” its Twitter bio read. Since the beginning of this year, the account had tweeted on average 130 times a day and had more than 40,000 followers.
Late on Friday, the account posted a minute-long video showing the now-iconic confrontation between a Native American elder and the high school students, with the caption, “This MAGA loser gleefully bothering a Native American protester at the Indigenous Peoples March.”
That version of the video was viewed at least 2.5 million times and was retweeted at least 14,400 times, according to a cached version of the tweet seen by CNN Business.
The video had been posted earlier on Instagram by someone who was at the event, but it was @2020fight’s caption that helped frame the news cycle.
They report that the assistant editor at Storyful saw the video going around Saturday morning from @2020fight, noting it was one of the first he saw:
Rob McDonagh, an assistant editor at Storyful, a service that vets content online, was monitoring Twitter activity on Saturday morning and said the @2020fight video was the main version of the incident being shared on social media.
In one indicator of the @2020fight’s video’s virality, multiple newsrooms, including some national American outlets, reached out to the user asking them directly about the video.
McDonagh said he found the account suspicious due to its “high follower count, highly polarized and yet inconsistent political messaging, the unusually high rate of tweets, and the use of someone else’s image in the profile photo.”
After CNN Business queried Twitter about the account, they deleted it:
Twitter’s rules forbid users from creating “fake and misleading accounts,” and shortly after CNN Business asked Twitter about the account, it was suspended.
CNN Business was unable to reach the person, or people, behind the account, to ask if they were indeed a California schoolteacher that chose to use someone else’s picture. Soon after we pointed out on Twitter that the account was using a different woman’s profile picture, the account blocked this reporter.
This anon account may have been the culprit, but there are always going to be culprits. This doesn’t take any responsibility away from the media organizations that ran with this video and phony narrative without getting all of the facts first.