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  • 2019-01-10 (xsd:date)
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  • Did Rashida Tlaib Tweet About America 'Raping and Pillaging' Her People? (en)
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  • In January 2019, a screenshot of a tweet purportedly posted by Congresswoman Rashida Tlaib, a Muslim, about how Americans had been raping and pillaging her people for decades began to spread on social media networks: This was not a genuine tweet from Rashida Tlaib. Although some posters presented this screenshot as if it showed a message that Tlaib had tweeted and then quickly deleted, this tweet was never posted to the congresswoman's Twitter account. A common tactic of Internet trolls is to impersonate celebrities and politicians by creating social media handles that resemble the legitimate handles of their targets. In this case, someone created a handle which used a capital I instead of a lower case L in the congresswoman's last name. This account was eventually deleted (along with the offending tweet), but we managed to find (and archive) a cached version of it: While it may be difficult to discern the difference between TIaib (with a capital I) and Tlaib (with a lower case L) due to the most prevalent font on Twitter, when we cut and pasted this handle into a word document and change the font to Comic Sans, it was clear that this was the tactic employed by this impostor account: In addition to the differing URLs, viewers could have deduced that this tweet was fake due to the lack of a verified check mark. In addition to correctly spelling her own name, Rashida Tlaib's genuine Twitter account has been verified by by Twitter: (en)
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