In recent days, a number of news sites that rely heavily on aggregation have posted stories about Minnesota governor and vice presidential candidate Tim Walz, reporting “allegations” that he sexually assaulted a minor while working as a teacher and football coach.
The clearly false claims stem from the prolific work of one man, a Twitter conspiracy peddler who goes by Black Insurrectionist. After previously pushing a lie about a presidential debate “whistleblower,” he’s at it again, and even his clownish mistakes haven’t kept the claims from taking off on Twitter, or being promoted by automated sections of the news ecosystem.
Black Insurrectionist, who tweets under the handle @docnetyoutube, is a self-professed MAGA fan who says he’s based in Dallas. He’s paid for his Twitter account, meaning his visibility is boosted on the site; he’s also followed by a number of people in the MAGA and right-leaning fake news spheres, including Donald Trump Jr., dirty tricks specialist and Trump adviser Roger Stone, Pizzagate promoter Liz Crokin, and conspiracy kingpin Alex Jones.
A screenshot of the email included a cursor, making it obvious he’d written it himself.
In September, he promoted an obviously fake story about a “whistleblower” at ABC News anonymously claiming the presidential debate hosted by the channel had been biased in favor of Kamala Harris. To back up the claims, he published a purported affidavit by the whistleblower, a poorly formatted and typo-riddled document that, among other things, claimed that Harris had been assured she wouldn’t be questioned about her time as “Attorney General in San Francisco,” a job she never held, as it doesn’t exist. The clumsy story still received immense pickup, including from hedge fund billionaire Bill Ackman, who began tweeting at various entities to investigate the claim; Elon Musk also shared some of Ackman’s posts.
This time, Black Insurrectionist says he received an anonymous email on August 9 from someone claiming they’d been sexually assaulted as a minor by Tim Walz. “I did indeed call the person making the claims,” Black Insurrectionist wrote. “He laid out a story that was very incredulous. I told him he would need to lay everything out in writing for me. In depth and in detail.” Black Insurrectionist included a screenshot of the purported first email; as thousands of people immediately noted, the image had a cursor at the end of the last sentence, making it obvious that he’d written it himself.
Undaunted, Black Insurrectionist went on to post dozens of tweets outlining the claim, including relaying another written “statement” from the victim claiming that Walz has a “raised scar” on his chest and a “Chinese symbol” tattooed on his thigh. Black Insurrectionist also claimed to have asked the Harris-Walz campaign for comment, writing, “If anything I am saying is not true, they could shoot me down in a hot second.”
The campaign is unlikely to comment on a weird set of lies spread by a random guy, but Black Insurrectionist’s claims, and his pose of performing journalism, have had their intended effect, with some of his posts being viewed over one million times. Other large accounts on Twitter who have paid for verification have posted versions of the claim, garnering hundreds of thousands of other views and retweets. A search for Tim Walz’s name on the platform’s “For You” tab return verified accounts making the allegations at the very top.
With the claim taking off on Twitter, it was quickly picked up by purported news sites that rely heavily on aggregating from social media, including the Hindustan Times, a New Delhi newspaper whose web operation often reposts viral rumors vaguely arranged into the form of a news story. Another Indian-based news outlet, Times Now, also reshared the claims; both stories also appeared on MSN.com, a news aggregation site owned by Microsoft with a large audience, since it appears as the internet homepage for many users of their software. Search MSN.com for “Tim Walz,” and you get results from Bing, the Microsoft search engine, collecting of aggregated stories under the heading “Tim Walz Accused Of Inappropriate Relations.”
This is one way a successful fake news story is built: the seeds sown in the ever-more chaotic Twitter, spread across the automated news sectors of the internet, and piped into the homes of potentially millions of people who won’t necessarily read past the headlines. And, as the ABC whistleblower story makes clear, if someone even more prominent—perhaps Twitter’s owner, busy as he is stumping for Donald Trump—reposts the allegations in any form, this smoldering claim could become a full-on wildfire.
MSN acknowledged a request for comment but did not immediately respond to emailed questions. Twitter no longer responds to requests for comment from journalists.
