How an X account pushed an unsubstantiated Tim Walz abuse allegation | US Election 2024 News

With Election Day just weeks away, a pro-Donald Trump X account claimed to have insider knowledge that Democratic vice presidential candidate and Minnesota Governor Tim Walz had “an inappropriate relationship with a minor” when he was a public schoolteacher.

The X account, which posts under the username @DocNetyoutube and goes by the name “Black Insurrectionist” is known for spreading unsubstantiated claims. In September, the X account elevated the unverified account that an ABC News whistleblower had said the network conspired with Vice President Kamala Harris’s campaign to set up the presidential debate in Harris’s favour.

On October 13, Black Insurrectionist posted that an unnamed, male former Walz student had contacted the X account in August, alleging Walz had sexually abused him in the 1990s when he was a student at Alliance High School in Nebraska.

Through more than 20 posts shared over almost 48 hours, Black Insurrectionist built the narrative around this allegation. But much of the purported evidence contained inconsistencies and inaccuracies. And the X account never offered verifiable proof 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 also identified a video of the claim as part of its efforts to counter inauthentic, misleading or false content.

Earlier this month, Walz was the subject of a similar unsubstantiated allegation that he “groomed” a foreign exchange student from Kazakhstan. NewsGuard, a company that tracks online misinformation, debunked the claim, finding that a Russian disinformation operative was pushing it.

McKenzie Sadeghi, NewsGuard’s artificial intelligence and foreign influence editor, said “DocNetYouTube played a key role in promoting the false Kazakhstan former exchange student narrative and distributing it to a larger audience.”

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

X account’s allegation is riddled with inconsistencies

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

For example, Black Insurrectionist shared side-by-side screenshots supposedly showing the former student’s initial email and the X account’s response. Although Black Insurrectionist’s email appeared to be sent using Proton Mail, an email service with end-to-end encryption, the picture of the former student’s email did not match Proton Mail’s layout. The account posted that it used 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 first email’s date had a leading zero in the day number, whereas the other two dates showed single digits only. 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 forged.

Black Insurrectionist wrote in an October 13 post that it contacted the Harris-Walz campaign before releasing details of this allegation. “I was trying to give them every chance in the world,” the X user wrote.

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

But PolitiFact found a discrepancy with the date on which Black Insurrectionist said it contacted the Harris-Walz campaign. The campaign website’s design in the screen recording does not match the website’s appearance on August 23, according to an archived version of the site.

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

But the screen recording showed a blue “Submit” button and a bright blue banner with the words “Contact Us” at the top of the page, as it did October 17, when we last looked.

Sometime between September 11 and September 13, the campaign website was updated, changing certain design elements and colours. This means the X account’s message was recorded after mid-September and not in August as it claimed.

Account twists facts about Walz to build allegation

To build the narrative around this allegation, Black Insurrectionist also manipulated facts about Walz’s life and career, pulling from information in public records and news reports.

For example, the X user wrote 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 abused 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 his high school’s gay-straight alliance adviser. The article included an anecdote about Walz and his wife, Gwen, who was also a public schoolteacher 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 this story “dropped” because the Harris-Walz campaign was “trying to get out in front of” the allegations the account was sharing.

The X account wrote in another October 13 post that the board overseeing Alliance Public Schools in Nebraska, where the Walzes taught, “voted 6-0 to fire Tim Walz”. In two subsequent posts, Black Insurrectionist shared screenshots of March and July 1996 board meeting minutes as purported proof.

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

In their resignation letters, included in the meeting minutes, the Walzes wrote that they were resigning 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 details about Walz in an attempt to corroborate the allegation. But these details do not lend credibility, as some of them are factually inaccurate or were already public knowledge.

For instance, one of the posts mentioned 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.

Also, the former student supposedly quoted Walz as saying he served in the Gulf War, an international conflict in the early 1990s triggered by Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait. But that is wrong. Although Walz served in the Nebraska National Guard then, he was not deployed for that war.

Walz’s sole military deployment came a decade later. He and his Minnesota National Guard unit were sent to Italy to support US operations in Afghanistan under Operation Enduring Freedom.