Steve Helber/AP
Days after helping launch a clearly false claim about vice presidential candidate Tim Walz, a disinformation peddler with a huge platform has disappeared from X.
The “Black Insurrectionist” profile began claiming last week that he’d been in touch with a former student of Walz who baselessly alleged the Minnesota governor sexually abused him years ago when he was a teacher and football coach. The now-missing account, which posted under the name @Docnetyoutube, has a documented history of promoting fake stories. But even with his profile gone, the seeds of the lie had already been sown and spread across the conspiracy ecosystem, driven by right-wing activists and self-styled conservative journalists.
“If it’s all a big lie, all a big hoax, that’s cool.”
The @Docnetyoutube account seems to have been deleted sometime on the evening of Thursday, October 17. It’s unclear if the user deleted the account or the company did: under Elon Musk’s ownership, X no longer responds to journalists and could not be reached for comment.
Twitter has proved to be a key nexus for the false claim. Earlier this week, a video began circulating on the platform claiming to depict Walz’s alleged victim. One of the most widely-seen tweets promoting the video was also recently deleted. It came from an X user calling himself @TheWakeninq, who uses variations of the name “QAnon76” on other websites. But the video, as BBC journalist Shayan Sardarizadeh noted, had obvious hallmarks of being a deepfake, with distorted facial features and a foreign-accented voice that was out of sync with the speaker’s movements. While the alleged victim is a real person who, according to his social media presence, did graduate from the school where Walz once taught and coached, other videos on his Facebook account capture someone who looks different and speaks with an American accent. According to his Facebook account, the now-adult former student—who did not immediately respond to a request for comment—has previously experienced homelessness; a Gofundme from 2021 said that he was living in Hawaii and trying to “get off the streets.” The video is still up on @TheWakeninq’s Rumble page, where it has been viewed by at least 6,000 people.
A local Texas Republican official named Sarah Fields, who also describes herself as a journalist, shared the video on Wednesday, claiming the student had come forward and “officially” accused Walz of abuse. She claimed to have filed public record requests with Walz’s old school, before adding that “Reportedly, a lawsuit is soon to be filed. I will keep you all updated. I’m watching this very closely.”
“I was able to confirm with multiple sources within the Trump campaign that THEY believe there is truth to these allegations, and have begun their own investigation,” she wrote.
Other conspiracy peddlers have gotten involved, including Ian Carroll, a self-styled independent journalist with a history of antisemitic statements. Carroll first promoted the story on October 14, crediting Black Insurrectionist with “breaking” it. In his own video on the subject, which has been viewed 2.5 million times on X, he claimed that Walz had been accused of “rampant” sexual assault. In a stab at fairness, he acknowledged that the claims “had not been corroborated yet,” but concluded that, “personally, I don’t think it’s looking good for Tim.”
A day later, Carroll provided an update of sorts—which has been viewed roughly a million times— saying that he’d been in contact with Black Insurrectionist and that he had a “40 minute phone call” with someone who “sounded an awful lot like a genuine whistleblower.” Still, noting “a lot of problems and inconsistencies” with the story, he conceded that it was “probably safe to assume” the claim was not real.
“I’m not some professional journalist or anything,” he said, while passing on word from the “whistleblower” that more proof would be forthcoming. He declared that a “somewhat decentralized network of powerful journalists and other protected actors” were working behind the scenes to promote the story if it turned out to be true.
“If it’s all a big lie, all a big hoax, that’s cool,” Carroll added, sounding chipper. “We all learned something.”
