Earlier this month, a video circulated on Twitter featuring a man who called himself Matthew Metro and who leveled damaging allegations against Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz while claiming to have been one of his former high school students.
However, the Washington Post tracked down the real Matthew Metro who attended Walz's high school, and it turns out that he never had Walz as a teacher.
What's more, the Post reports that Metro is dismayed that someone seems to have stolen his identity and used it to smear the Democratic vice presidential nominee.
"It’s an invasion of my privacy and my personal life," Metro told the Post.
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As the Post noted, the hoax involving Metro has quickly become a reality that political candidates have to deal with while running for office in the age of X CEO Elon Musk's anything-goes approach to content moderation.
"In a political environment awash with false claims, including sophisticated faked videos of prominent figures, the hoax was unusual in that it appeared to draw on open-source research to crudely steal the identity of a member of the public who had a tenuous historical connection to a candidate currently in the public eye," reported the Post.
"Moreover, the former student appeared to have been selected because personal details about his real life — among them, his sexual orientation — figured into the fabricated claim and could be seen as corroborating it."
The Post also reached out to Hany Farid, a professor of computer science at the Berkeley Artificial Intelligence Lab, who told the paper that the fake Metro video did not rely on any kind of technical trickery but was simply made by an imposter impersonating the real Metro.