A Twitter account with more than 40,000 followers has been suspended after it spread a viral video showing a Native American elder on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial last week surrounded by students from a Catholic high school wearing “Make America Great Again” hats.
The account, @2020fight, claimed to have belonged to a California schoolteacher named Talia, but used a picture of a Brazilian blogger, according to CNN Business. The account tweeted hundreds of times each day and shared a brief video of the encounter between Nathan Phillips and Covington Catholic High School student Nick Sandmann with the words, “This MAGA loser gleefully bothering a Native American protester at the Indigenous Peoples March.”
A cached version of the tweet obtained by CNN Business shows that the video was viewed more than 2.5 million times and was retweeted at least 14,000 times. The video had initially been shared on Instagram, but then went viral after being shared on Twitter.
[Read more: Trump Jr. calls on Twitter to ban Kathy Griffin calling for ‘doxing’ of teens]
The short video shows Sandmann and other students enveloping Phillips, but a longer video clip shows that Phillips actually was the one who first approached the students while he sang and beat a drum. The students’ behavior, including Sandmann standing directly in front of Phillips, and his peers jumping around and singing, has led to a dayslong debate over whether they were acting inappropriately.
According to Rob McDonagh, an assistant editor at social media intelligence agency Storyful, the account showed several red flags, including a “high follower count, highly polarized and yet inconsistent political messaging, the unusually high rate of tweets, and the use of someone else’s image in the profile photo.”
Twitter bars accounts that are inauthentic and misleading. @2020fight was suspended shortly after CNN Business inquired about the account.
