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At the end of February 2020, various right-leaning websites and social media users reproduced a purported Feb. 5 tweet from Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) criticizing President Trump for having prematurely restricted travel to and from China (in order to protect against the COVID-19 coronavirus' being spread to the U.S.), and a month later some were still taking the tweet at face value and reposting it: That this alleged tweet did not exist in Schumer's Twitter timeline was also taken by some of those who reproduced and criticized it as evidence that Schumer had subsequently tried to cover it up by deleting it. In fact, Schumer never tweeted any such thing -- the image of the purported tweet was just a fabrication likely created using one of the many fake Tweet generator websites that exist online. The ProPublica news outlet maintains a Politiwoops database of the Tweets They Didn't Want You to See which tracks deleted tweets by public officials, including people currently in office and candidates for office. That database recorded no such deleted tweet from Schumer's Twitter account. As well, we found no evidence that this purported tweet had ever been retweeted, commented upon, or otherwise reproduced at the time it was supposedly posted, as it certainly would have been. Some websites that wrongly criticized Schumer over the tweet without verifying it later acknowledged that they had been hoaxed:
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