Wikimedia Commons / Gage Skidmore
Oops. Ted Cruz got trolled.
On Monday, Cruz used his account on X, the platform formerly called Twitter, to reshare a doctored photo that purports to shows a shark swimming down a Los Angeles freeway after the Hurricane Hilary made landfall in Southern California.
"Friend of mine out in LA just took this picture on the 405 [freeway]," tweeted user @bigcatbarstool (actually Dan Katz of media company Barstool Sports). "And yes, all news and media outlets you have permission to use this. Wild."
“Holy crap,” Texas' junior senator responded with his reshare.
Only there's a problem. Well, a problem beyond believing a too-weird-to-be-true image shared by someone from the famously snarky Barstool Sports brand without first checking its validity. And the problem is this: the shark photo isn't just a fake, but a fake that's been circulated to fucking death on social media for the past dozen years.Holy crap. https://t.co/PEfQikM0Cd
— Ted Cruz (@tedcruz) August 21, 2023
Had Cruz had any troll radar, or bothered to check Snopes, he would have gleaned that the image is a fake as Donald Trump's tan and that it first circulated online after Hurricane Irene slammed into Puerto Rico back in 2011.
"Since then the same image has been recirculated several times over, typically localized to some big city in the United States that has just experienced a hurricane or other weather event producing heavy rains and floods," Snopes noted.
Predictably, Cruz was drenched by a wave of online ridicule, and he subsequently acknowledged that he'd been played. Although not without trying to work in a jab at LA.
“I’m told this is a joke,” Cruz eventually tweeted. “In LA, you never know… And everyone please stay safe from the storm or otherwise.”
Better luck next time, Ted.
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