A tweet that appeared to show far-right influencer Candace Owens mocking Ben Shapiro for mentioning a “dry” bank account went viral on Friday. The tweet referenced “Ben’s wife,” and based on viral screenshots, it even appears to have been deleted. But this tweet isn’t true. It was made by a comedian.
“My bank account will be temporarily drained after being fired today, but not as drained as Ben’s wife,” Owens’ fake tweet said. read.
Photoshopped tweets about Shapiro and “Dry” have been, shall we say, common on social media platforms like Back to 2020.
Owens joined The Daily Wire, a conservative media network co-founded by Shapiro, in 2021 to host a weekly show.But Owens left the network on Friday, according to a social media post from The Telegraph’s chief executive Jeremy Bolling. It’s unclear whether Owens resigned or was fired, but it’s easy to speculate as to why Owens and The Telegraph parted ways.
Owens has clashed with Shapiro, who is Jewish, in recent months over Shapiro’s peddling of anti-Semitic conspiracy theories and claims on the show that Jewish “gangs” have done “horrible things.” in hollywood.Owens recently Like a tweet Regarding Jews being “drunk with Christian blood,” this seemed to be the final straw for the network.
The fake tweet, which appeared to be from Owens, seemed to fool a lot of people, including one user X, who wrote on Friday: “This is the one and only time I would offer her that. Post support.”
another user commented“Why do people always tweet their best revelations and then fucking delete them after everyone has seen them a thousand times.” Of course, the answer is that they didn’t actually tweet them in the first place.
The tweet also spread to at least one other social media platform, X competitor BlueSky, where it was widely shared. real.
This tweet was actually created by a user named “X” trap queen lovers. If the name sounds familiar, that’s probably because they often go viral using fake screenshots that look like deleted tweets. In fact, earlier this month Gizmodo debunked a popular tweet The piece from Trap Queen Enthusiast looks like it was created by Grimes, a musician and former partner of billionaire Elon Musk.
Owens’ fake tweets are over 900,000 views At the time of writing, the project is rapidly gaining momentum. But Community Notes, X’s crowdsourced fact-checking program, has yet to show public corrections.
The genius of these fake tweets is that it’s difficult to fact-check unless you know the players involved. Passing along a screenshot with the small text “This post has been deleted” at the bottom makes it nearly impossible for the average person to verify that it ever existed.
The Trap Queen fan has yet to respond to messages on X, but Gizmodo will update this article if we hear back. In the meantime, all we can tell you is that it’s not true.