Thread by @ddale8

So I spoke to Ben Costiloe, tweeter of the inaccurate mega-viral impeachment tweet, to tell him it was wrong and that I'd be doing a fact check. He said good-naturedly: "Tear it a new one. Go for it, baby!" He said he's just a "nobody" dude who saw the info on his FB feed. 1/

Costiloe said he never knew if the info he tweeted was true - it just showed up on his Facebook and "made me feel good," and he thought he'd share. He said, "I don't want to mess up the world. I just wanted to make me feel good. It turns out it made a lot of people feel good." 2/

Costiloe said he had just 200 followers at the time he tweeted (now more than 2,700); he's just a guy living with diabetes in Texas. He said he was amazed at how viral the tweet went given his low following: 181,000 retweets and counting. 3/

When I asked if he'd delete the tweet now that he knows it had a bunch of inaccuracies, he said, "I'm too stupid to know how to fix this."

So...that is the story of how bad info got seen by millions of people in 2021. The end.

Update: Costiloe has now deleted the Friday tweet. (He says his “too stupid” response when I asked him Sunday whether he’d delete was about not knowing how to fix the harm from his misinformation that spread so widely, not saying he didn’t know how to delete a tweet.)