On Jan. 17, 2023, Twitter user @DVATW tweeted, "Hi @AyannaPressley - Can you please explain what this means? Thanks." The screenshot under the tweet, which was poor quality, appeared to show that Rep. Ayanna Pressley, D-Mass., had tweeted from an iPhone, "IQ is a measure of whiteness." The date showed as June 15, 2021.
However, no, this tweet never appeared on Pressley's Twitter feed. It was fake.
We contacted Pressley's office and they confirmed that it was a fake, telling us, "No, Rep. Pressley never tweeted this."
There's no record of the tweet ever appearing on Pressley's Twitter account, including on PolitiTweet or any other page-archiving websites. There was also no reporting from any news or political blogs whatsoever that mentioned the words, "IQ is a measure of whiteness."
The fake tweet screenshot that appeared in @DVATW's tweet was added to iFunny.co on Jan. 17. It was also posted one day later on Jan. 18 on the r/PoliticalCompassMemes subreddit on Reddit.
Thanks to a helpful reader, we were able to confirm that the fake tweet originally came from a post on /pol/ on the 4chan.org message board. That post was created on June 18, 2021.