As sad as it may seem, there are those who take advantage of the health crisis to gain notoriety through social networks although for this he must resort to pranks with which to instill fear in society. This is what happens with the monkeypoxthe subject of fake news that has managed to sneak into many media.
On July 30, a Twitter user explained through a thread how he contracted monkey pox from touching the handlebars of a scooter he bought through Wallapop of an infected person. Although he didn’t provide any proof beyond his story, it didn’t take long for it to go viral.
What has been shown is that it’s a fake profile because it is a repurposed account, with a fake profile picture and has recently changed content type delete previous messages in bulk.
The account is currently called @mei_rito although it was called before @SusanaPresident work like political parody account Susana Díaz. “La Felipona, professional politics. I graduated in law at 17. I stabbed Pedro Sánchez. Now in golden retirement in the Senate,” his biography said in 2021. It should also be noted that the account was inactive between 2016 and 2019.
On the other hand, the image he currently displays on his profile is not that of an anonymous citizen, but that of British cyclist Adam Yates. For its part, the header is a photograph of an Adidas campaign.
There is multiple evidence that this account that uses Adam Yates as a profile picture was formerly @SusanaPresident. We can recover tweets with the web archive, but we can also see how she was tagged in PSOE events in Andalusia or they replied to her and the fake account appears. pic.twitter.com/TCKV76Jd6z
— Julian Macias Tovar (@JulianMaciasT) August 1, 2022
This user added in his bio that he is “the author of the One Tweet Wonder ‘how i got the monkey pox from Wallapop'” and completely changed the type of content you postdedicating himself to contributing to publications on Podemos and talking about cardiac programs, having in his biography the hashtag of support for Rocío Carrasco, daughter of Rocío Jurado.
Considering the fact that this is a fake profile, the chances of it being a hoax are very high. In addition, get infected the way he reported (“The most probable contagion, from what they tell me, since my sex life has not changed, is that the virus ended up on my mucous membranes after having impregnated me with it on the handles scooter“, he explained), although not 100% ruled out, it is highly unlikely. The usual thing is that the virus spreads when it comes into contact skin to skin or mucosa to mucosa.
“I don’t have monkey pox and I haven’t spoken to him”
This isn’t the only case that went viral that ended up being exposed as a hoax. A photograph taken in a Madrid metro car showing the legs of a man believed to have been infected with monkeypox showing some wounds.
Arturo (@arturohenriques), the Twitter user who shared it, identified himself as a doctor and, according to his testimony, he approached this young man to warn him that he might be infected with monkeypox, to which he replied that his doctor had not prescribed him any confinement and that in addition he was wearing a mask.
MARM shows the wounds caused by his illness in the face of the hoax he suffered about monkeypox MARM
Considering this, the protagonist of the photograph had to come out and deny this story. “I don’t have monkeypox and I’ve never talked to him.“, explained the MARM to 20 minutesnoting that the disease he suffers from is called neurofibromatosis, a disease he has suffered from since birth and this causes injuries to the extremities produced by the growth of little fears in the nerves. It’s not contagious.
After MARM denounced this hoax, the user who shared this story has closed their Twitter account.