A video of the confrontation between a group of male high school students wearing red Make America Great Again hats and a Native-American elder at the Indigenous Peoples March at the Lincoln Memorial on Friday went viral after it was tweeted by a Twitter user with the handle @2020fight. According to the Twitter bio of @2020fight, the user is a teacher named Talia living in California. On Monday, Twitter suspended the account after CNN found it wasn’t the account of the person it had purported to be.
The account claimed to belong to a California schoolteacher. Its profile photo was not of a schoolteacher, but of a blogger based in Brazil, CNN Business found. Twitter suspended the account soon after CNN Business asked about it.
The account, with the username @2020fight, was set up in December 2016 and appeared to be the tweets of a woman named Talia living in California. “Teacher & Advocate. Fighting for 2020,” its Twitter bio read. Since the beginning of this year, the account had tweeted on average 130 times a day and had more than 40,000 followers.
After discovering the account’s profile photo was of a blogger in Brazil, CNN’s Donie O’Sullivan reached out to the account to ask if they were indeed a California school teacher using someone else’s profile photo. O’Sullivan did not get a reply and instead was blocked by the account. That’s when CNN contacted Twitter directly about the account, which suspended it on Monday.
A Twitter spokesperson told CNN, “Deliberate attempts to manipulate the public conversation on Twitter by using misleading account information is a violation of the Twitter Rules,” which is why it suspended the account. It’s still unknown who is actually behind the @2020fight account or what agenda they may have, if any. You can view a cached version of the account here.
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