A tweet showing a badly damaged Walmart has racked up more than 1 million views on Twitter. It has no context other than a caption that reads, “Fairfield, California Walmart. Guess who? #DemocratsAreDestroyingAmerica.”
But the tweet doesn’t show an incident in Fairfield, local police say, and they’ve been desperately trying to get Twitter to intervene.
“This account is not a reputable source of information. This is absolutely untrue,” the Fairfield Police Department account tweeted. “There has been no such incident in Fairfield, California. #MisinformationIsADangerousThing.”
A spokesperson from the department told KPIX that they’ve been receiving 911 calls about the tweet.
“One of the biggest things is instilling fear in the community, which results in them calling us again,” Officer Jennifer Brantley told KPIX. “… That line can get tied up if we’re inundated with calls and people who have an actual emergency will have to wait.”
Although the implication of the tweet is that Bay Area looters have trashed the store, the video shows a layer of standing water on the floor, which suggests the footage could be from a natural disaster. A search for recently damaged Walmart stores shows that old clips from 2020 have been circulating on social media, represented as looting happening right now.
The problem is so bad that Fairfield PD attempted to get Elon Musk’s attention in his preferred language: memes.
“Hello @elonmusk @TwitterSafety @TwitterSupport can you address this guy sharing misleading #tweets. That would be great,” the department tweeted, accompanied by an edited photo of a Fairfield police cruiser shooting up into the sky like a SpaceX launch.
As of publication time, the tweet has not been removed, although a tagline has been added. “Readers added context they thought people might want to know,” it reads. “Fairfield CA Police deny any such incident occurred.”
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