How an X account raised a baseless allegation of abuse by Tim Walz | News about the 2024 US elections

With Election Day just weeks away, a pro-Donald Trump attended a public school.

The X account, which posts under the username @DocNetyoutube and goes by the name “Black Insurrectionist,” is known for spreading baseless claims. In September, the

On October 13, Black Insurrectionist posted that an unnamed male former Walz student had contacted the .

Through more than two dozen posts shared over nearly 48 hours, Black Insurrectionist built the narrative around this accusation. But much of the alleged evidence contained inconsistencies and inaccuracies. And the X account never provided verifiable evidence to support the claim.

Still, some of Black Insurrectionist’s X-posts about Walz were viewed millions of times. And this baseless story has spread to other social media platforms, including Facebook, Instagram, Threads and TikTok.

The Facebook, Instagram and Threads posts were flagged as part of Meta’s efforts to combat false news and misinformation on its news feed. TikTok has also identified a video of the claim as part of its efforts to combat inauthentic, misleading or false content.

Earlier this month, Walz was the subject of a similar baseless accusation that he was “grooming” a foreign exchange student from Kazakhstan. NewsGuard, a company that tracks online disinformation, debunked the claim and found that a Russian disinformation agent pushed it.

McKenzie Sadeghi, NewsGuard’s artificial intelligence and foreign influence editor, said: “DocNetYouTube played a key role in promoting the false narrative of former exchange students from Kazakhstan and spreading it to a wider audience.”

PolitiFact contacted the Harris-Walz campaign, but a spokesperson declined to comment.

X account’s claim is riddled with inconsistencies

Black Insurrectionist’s initial post on October 13 announcing the email correspondence with the former student included screenshots of the alleged emails. But formatting inconsistencies undermined the authenticity of the emails.

For example, Black Insurrectionist shared side-by-side screenshots that purportedly show the former student’s first email and the response from X account. Although Black Insurrectionist’s email appeared to be sent via Proton Mail, an email service with end-to-end encryption, the image of the former student’s email did not match Proton’s layout Mail. The account reported using Proton Mail, Yahoo Mail, and Rocketmail, but none of the former student’s email screenshots matched those layouts either.

Screenshots of the former student’s emails also showed inconsistent date formatting. For example, the date of the first email had a leading zero in the day number, while the other two dates showed only single digits. The second email also lacked a comma after the day of the week.

Additionally, Black Insurrectionist’s screenshot of the former student’s August 9 email showed a cursor, indicating the email may have been spoofed.

Black Insurrectionist wrote in an Oct. 13 post that it had contacted the Harris-Walz campaign before releasing details of this allegation. “I tried to give them all the chances in the world,” the X user wrote.

In that post, the user shared a screen capture of a message typed and sent via Harris-Walz’s campaign website. The typed message included the date “8/23/24.” No other date was visible in the recording.

But PolitiFact discovered a discrepancy with the date Black Insurrectionist said it contacted the Harris-Walz campaign. According to an archived version of the site, the design of the campaign website in the screenshot does not match the appearance of the website on August 23.

An Aug. 23 archive of the campaign website’s contact page showed a red “Send” button and a navy blue banner at the top of the page.

But the screenshot showed a blue “Send” button and a bright blue banner with the words “Contact Us” at the top of the page, just like on October 17, when we last looked at it.

Sometime between September 11 and 13, the campaign website was updated, with certain design elements and colors changing. This means that the message from the X account was recorded after mid-September and not in August as claimed.

Account distorts facts about Walz to build allegations

To build the story around this accusation, Black Insurrectionist also manipulated facts about Walz’s life and career, relying on information from public records and news reports.

For example, the X user wrote on October 13 that the former student said Walz took him to an Indigo Girls concert in Nebraska in March 1995. In a subsequent post, the X user wrote that the former student said Walz sexually assaulted him after the concert.

Months earlier, on August 20, The New York Times published a story about Walz’s efforts to support gay students as an advisor for his high school’s gay-straight alliance. The article included an anecdote about Walz and his wife Gwen, who was also a teacher in Nebraska, taking a gay student to an Indigo Girls concert in the 1990s. The article did not say exactly when or where the concert was held.

Black Insurrectionist claimed that this story “dropped” because the Harris-Walz campaign was “trying to stand up for” the allegations the account shared.

The In two subsequent posts, Black Insurrectionist shared screenshots of the minutes of the March and July 1996 board meetings as alleged evidence.

But the minutes of the meeting do not support the X account’s claim. The documents, obtained by PolitiFact from the superintendent of Alliance Public Schools, show that the school board unanimously approved Walz’s request for professional leave in March 1996. Four months later, in July 1996, the board accepted the resignation of Tim and Gwen Walz from their teaching and coaching positions. positions at Alliance Public Schools.

In their resignation letters, included in the minutes of the meeting, the Walzes wrote that they resigned because they had accepted teaching positions at Mankato West High School in Minnesota.

The former student’s account shared by this X user also included personal information about Walz in an attempt to substantiate the claim. But these details do not lend credibility because some of them are factually incorrect or were already common knowledge.

For example, one of the messages mentioned that Walz had a “hearing problem.” It has been widely reported that Walz suffered hearing loss from decades in the military. Walz underwent corrective surgery in 2005 to improve his condition.

The former student also reportedly quoted Walz as saying he had served in the Gulf War, an international conflict sparked by Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait in the early 1990s. But that’s wrong. Although Walz was serving in the Nebraska National Guard at the time, he was not deployed to that war.

Walz’s only military deployment came ten years later. He and his Minnesota National Guard unit were deployed to Italy to support U.S. operations in Afghanistan as part of Operation Enduring Freedom.