In late May 2025, a rumor spread online that U.S. Rep. Nancy Mace, a Republican from South Carolina, ordered her staffers to create burner accounts on social media to promote her. (A burner account is a social media account created "for the purpose of remaining anonymous.")
Claims spread on X, Facebook, Bluesky and Reddit. While some posts presented the claim as an allegation, others presented it as fact.
The rumor appeared to originate with reporting from Wired, a reputable tech magazine, which ran a story on May 28 titled, "Nancy Mace's Former Staff Claim She Had Them Create Burner Accounts to Promote Her."
The keyword here is claim: The Wired story does not present the statement that Mace ordered her staffers to create burner accounts as 100% factual, instead treating it as an allegation made by anonymous former staff members. Similarly, Snopes cannot put a fact-check rating on this story because there is not enough verifiable public evidence definitively proving or disproving the claim.
With that said, here is what we do know about the allegations.
Breaking down the Wired story
Wired's story, written by senior politics writer Jake Lahut, relies on anonymous sources identified as former Mace staffers. These sources requested anonymity "because they fear reprisal from their former boss," per Lahut's article. Snopes could not, as of this writing, independently verify the legitimacy of Lahut's sources; Lahut said via a polite email that he could not make any promises about helping Snopes with its verification process in the immediate future due to his own workload.
Here are the claims as presented in the Wired story:
A principal—and unusual—use to which Mace put her skills, according to former staffers, was setting up burner accounts on a variety of social media platforms to monitor what people were saying about her and bolster her image. They also claim she requested that staffers make their own burner accounts to defend her online.
"We had to make multiple accounts, burner accounts, and go and reply to comments, saying things that weren't true—even Reddit forums," a former staffer says. "We were congressional staff, and there were actual things we could be doing to help the constituents."
Mace's communications director, Sydney Long, disputed the allegations. "Nancy Mace's Communications Director here, can confidently say I've never been asked to make a burner account," Long wrote in a May 28 X post. "This isn't the hit y'all think it is." In an email to Snopes, Long wrote, "I would give you an additional comment but we're too busy creating burner accounts, according to former staff. (sarcasm)."
"As Congresswoman Mace's Communications Director, I can say with complete confidence: I've never been asked to create a burner account, and the suggestion is laughable," Long's email continued.
Long did not provide Mace's reaction to the story, but Mace appeared to acknowledge the Wired story in a May 29 X post, in which she said: "Comment your burner account below."
Additional evidence of Mace's burner accounts
One popular post on Facebook claimed that Mace's former staff "said under oath" they had to create burner accounts to promote Mace. That's a misunderstanding of Wired's reporting, which instead described an April 28 deposition of a former consultant for Mace, Wesley Donehue, who reportedly said under oath that Mace sets up her own burner accounts and bots on social media. The deposition makes no mention of Mace ordering staff to set up burner accounts or bots.
As for the legitimacy of the deposition in question: While it does not seem to appear in Charleston's court case search system, a document available in the system mentions the deposition on Page 7, suggesting it is legitimate. Lawyers named in the deposition did not immediately return a request to verify its authenticity.
Here is the relevant portion of Donehue's statement on Page 10 — or Page 40, if you're using the page numbers of the original document instead of the PDF — first published by conservative South Carolina news outlet FITSNews on May 21 (emphasis ours):
Nancy Mace is quite the -- when I use the word "nerd" or "geek," it's always favorable, but a computer nerd or a computer geek. She programs her own bots, she sets up Twitter burner accounts. This is kind of a thing she does. She sits all night on the couch and programs bots, because she's very, very computer savvy. She controls her own voter database, she programs a lot of her own website, she programs Facebook bots and Instagram bots and Twitter bots. It's what she does for fun.
Lawyers representing Mace's former fiance, Patrick Bryant, deposed Donehue after South Carolina law enforcement reportedly interviewed him in connection with an ongoing criminal investigation into sexual assault allegations made by Mace against Bryant. (Bryant has repeatedly denied these allegations.) While Donehue publicly disparaged Mace and said that he fired her as a client, FITSNews reported that Donehue initially refused to give a statement.
Snopes previously examined Mace's claim she was physically accosted by a man who shook her hand and a rumor that she vandalized her own home.