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.

Non-paywall link

  • peopleproblems@lemmy.world
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    1 month ago

    This isn’t fair to him. This is the sort of terrorism I was afraid of.

    Fuck the GOP. Fuck Russia. If this convinces one person, it’s too many.

    I don’t know how, but we need to destroy racism once and for all. Make it mandatory education on what they do. Make it mandatory education on how it destroys a country. Make it mandatory education how fascism is deadly to even the in group.

    But first, Dems need to stack the Supreme Court. I’ve said it since I learned in highschool that FDR did it to save the goddamn country. Remove the filibuster. End FPTP. End the representative cap. If the Senate serves some important legislative function, keep them, but remove their voting power. Or also have the Senate divided up by population.

    Write an amendment reversing Citizens United.

    Then, maybe, we have a chance at continuing the great experiment.