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An image shared on Facebook purportedly shows a tweet by conservative commentator Ben Shapiro about his #redpill moment. Verdict: False The tweet is not a genuine post by Shapiro. It appears to have been fabricated by a Reddit user. Fact Check: The Facebook post shares what appears to be a screen grab of a March 26 tweet sent by Shapiro, reading, My #redpill moment came about when I turned 7 years old. My mom sent me to school with cupcakes for my birthday and the teacher made me share them with my classmates, even the poor ones whose mothers never sent cupcakes for THEIR birthdays. The rage of that day has never left me. A reference to the 1999 film The Matrix , the phrase red-pill has frequently been employed by conspiracy theorists to describe people learning unsettling new information, according to Newsweek . (RELATED: Did Joe Biden Recently Gain 19 Million Twitter Followers In Just Two Days?) The image, however, does not depict a genuine tweet from Shapiro. Check Your Fact searched Shapiro’s verified Twitter account but found no matching statement. An archived screen grab of Shapiro’s Twitter account from March 26, the day the tweet was sent, also does not show the purported tweet. Had Shapiro actually sent a tweet about his #redpill moment, it is likely media outlets would have reported on it, yet an internet search didn’t turn up any such news report. The statement is likewise absent from his Facebook posts , nor was it published on the conservative news website the Daily Wire , which he co-founded . The image of the fake tweet appears to have been first posted on Reddit on March 26 by a user whose bio states: I make fake tweets. If I posted it, I wrote it. The user had previously posted images of fake tweets by Shapiro and other conservative media personalities and politicians.
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