A tweet that appears to show far-right influencer Candace Owens ridiculing Ben Shapiro with reference to a “dry” bank account went viral on Friday. The tweet refers to “Ben’s wife” and even looks like it had been deleted, based on a viral screenshot. But the tweet isn’t real. It was made by a comedian.
“After getting fired today, my bank account is gonna be dry for a while, but not as dry as Ben’s wife,” the fake tweet from Owens reads.
Photoshopped tweets about Shapiro and “dryness,” shall we say, have been common on social media platforms like X ever since the conservative commentator awkwardly read lyrics to Cardi B’s hit song “WAP” back in 2020.
Owens joined the Daily Wire, a conservative media network co-founded by Shapiro, in 2021 to host a weekly show. But Owens departed the network on Friday, according to a social media post by Daily Wire CEO Jeremy Boreing. It’s still not clear whether Owens quit or was fired, but it’s easy to guess why Owens and the Daily Wire parted ways.
Owens had clashed with Shapiro, who’s Jewish, in recent months as she’s peddled antisemitic conspiracy theories, claiming on her show that Jewish “gangs” do “horrific things” in Hollywood. Owens recently liked a tweet about Jews being “drunk on Christian blood,” which appears to have been the last straw for the network.
The fake tweet that’s been made to look like it’s from Owens seems to have tricked quite a few people, including one X user who wrote on Friday, “The singular one and only time I will give her props that post is gold.”
Another user commented, “Why do people always post their best bangers and then fucking delete them after everyone has already seen it a thousand times.” The answer, of course, is that they didn’t actually tweet them in the first place.
The tweet has also made it to at least one other social media platform, the X rival BlueSky, where it’s getting passed around as real.
The tweet was actually created by an X user who goes by the name Trap Queen Enthusiast. And if that name sounds familiar, it’s probably because they often go viral using fake screenshots that are made to look like they’re deleted tweets. In fact, earlier this month Gizmodo debunked a popular tweet from Trap Queen Enthusiast that was made to look like it had come from musician Grimes, the former partner of billionaire Elon Musk.
The fake tweet from Owens has over 900,000 views at the time of this writing and is picking up steam rapidly. But Community Notes, the crowdsourced fact-checking program at X, has yet to display a public correction.
Part of the genius of these fake tweets is that it’s incredibly difficult to fact-check unless you know the players involved. Passing around a screenshot with that little text “This post has been deleted” at the bottom makes it almost impossible for the average person to verify whether it ever existed.
The Trap Queen Enthusiast hasn’t responded to a message on X, but Gizmodo will update this post if we hear back. In the meantime, all we can tell you is that this one isn’t real.