The real former student, a man who attended a school where Walz taught, told The Post that they never met. He said he was dismayed to see the video showing someone using his name to make the claims.
Matthew Metro didn’t recognize the face that popped up on his cellphone screen when he clicked a link that a friend texted him last week. But after hitting play on the online video, he was dismayed by what he saw.
“My name is Matthew Metro,” said the man in the video, who went on to describe life as a student decades ago at a high school in Minnesota where Democratic vice-presidential nominee Tim Walz was a teacher. Some of the details — including about being at the school when Walz worked there — matched the biography of the real Metro. But the man in the video went further, leveling fabricated allegations against Walz, whom the real Metro said he never met.
Millions of people have viewed social media posts containing the video since it was published Wednesday on X, formerly Twitter. For some viewers, the use of Metro’s name and verifiable biographical details created an aura of credibility around the false allegations. Not so for the real Metro, whom The Washington Post located in Hilo, Hawaii.
Is this not somehow illegal and could whoever created that fake story not be held accountable?
I don’t know about this specifically but I’ve read that a lot of this Walz allegation stuff is being traced to Russia. In general a lot of Harris Walz misinformation/deepfakes are allegedly coming from Russia.
Wired has a paywalled article but if you google ‘Walz allegations fake Russia’ you’ll get quite a few hits.
But if that’s the case, like ‘quasi-professional’ propaganda firms, they probably use cracked wifi, VPNs, coffee shops, probably hard to find them at a physical location, let alone Russia allowing extradition. They’d want some fair trade at a minimum
Coming from Russia, boosted by Musk
Yes. If the person is not located in the US or a country that would extradite, that gets significantly less likely and possible though.