{"id":22456,"date":"2020-02-28T16:29:03","date_gmt":"2020-02-29T00:29:03","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/?p=22456"},"modified":"2020-02-28T22:31:10","modified_gmt":"2020-02-29T06:31:10","slug":"twitter-verified-fake-2020-candidate","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/?p=22456","title":{"rendered":"Twitter verified fake 2020 candidate"},"content":{"rendered":"

Twitter earlier this month verified an account for a fake 2020 congressional candidate created by a teenager.<\/p>\n

The account was for a fictional Republican congressional candidate from Rhode Island named Andrew Walz.<\/p>\n

His Twitter bio claimed that Walz was a “proven business leader” and a “passionate advocate for students,”\u00a0CNN Business first reported<\/a>.<\/p>\n

The owner of the account was a 17-year-old high schooler from upstate New York who, according to the network, made the account over the holidays because he was “bored.”<\/p>\n

“During Christmas break I was kind of bored and I learned a lot from history class, but also on the news they were talking more about misinformation,” the high school student told CNN Business.<\/p>\n

The teen said it took him about 20 minutes to make the website for his candidate and then another five minutes to create the Twitter account.<\/p>\n

He got his profile picture from a website called\u00a0This Person Does Not Exist<\/a>, which computer generates realistic photos of fake people.<\/p>\n

Then, he filled out a short survey with information about his fake candidate on Ballotpedia, the nonprofit “Encyclopedia for American Politics.” Twitter announced in December that it would be partnering with the nonprofit in an attempt to verify more congressional candidates.<\/p>\n

However, according to the student, neither Twitter or Ballotpedia asked for any further kind of identification to confirm that Walz was, in fact, genuine.<\/p>\n

The social media platform has received flak from candidates who say it has been slow to verify them.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Twitter earlier this month verified an...<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12,7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-22456","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-science-tech","category-u-s-a"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22456","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=22456"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22456\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":22457,"href":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22456\/revisions\/22457"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=22456"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=22456"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=22456"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}