What Marco Rubio’s Twitter account tweeted over the weekend. The tweet has since been deleted.
Ah, Senator Marco Rubio’s Twitter has gone into overdrive recently when it comes to Venezuela, and this weekend, he once again took it too far, when tweeting that the latest power outage in the Latin American country was caused by a transformer explosion near the “German Dam” in Bolivia.
Problem is, Rubio got his facts wrong, because the “German Dam” mentioned was actually journalist “Germán Dam.” As Dam’s tweet said in response to Rubio:
Senator @marcorubio, an important transformer exploded in Bolívar and that, in part, again collapsed the Venezuelan Electric System; however it was not in a dam, much less german.
My name is Germán Dam, I am one of the journalists who published the information.
??? https://t.co/DicWDJzlfQ— Germán Dam (@GEDV86) March 9, 2019
You can imagine that the tweet got attention, with several digital outlets publishing about it.
And earlier on Monday morning, Rubio’s account tweeted to Dam:
Sorry @GEDV86
I meant to type “Today another transformer explosion in Bolivar State caused another massive blackout according to German Dam.” It was a thread & I usually go back & add the twitter handle before tweeting. This one I pressed “tweet all” before I checked.
— Marco Rubio (@marcorubio) March 11, 2019
Ok. But it’s kind hard to accept that Twitter “excuse” when you have a profile with more than 10,000 tweets. Also, Rubio’s account has been active for more than 11 years now.
Also, let’s be real: this is not the first time Rubio’s Twitter has tweeted unverified information about Venezuela. On February 23, he went ahead and tweeted about #BarcoPuertoRico (did it even happen?), the same day Rubio insisted that the Nicolás Maduro government burned humanitarian aid on the Colombia-Venezuela border, when in fact there was enough reporting to easily contradict that unvetted claim.
Maybe Rubio should step away from the Twitter for a while?
This is getting to be a very clear pattern that a sitting U.S. senator would rather just share something without thinking or verifying. For someone who screams about “fake news,” it’s pretty clear the Florida senator has become a major practitioner of it, no?
