A fake tweet falsely claimed the father of a murdered girl in Tennessee vowed to fight “trans evil”

By: Sam Doak
March 30 2023

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Context

In the aftermath of the Covenant School shooting on March 27, 2023, a significant amount of discussion and media coverage has been focused on the gender identity of the alleged perpetrator. 

Officials and media outlets have reported that the suspect, who was killed at the scene by local police, was a transgender man. With this information in the public domain, several dubious narratives have arisen in the days since the shooting. One of these involves the family of a victim and their purported response to the tragedy. This narrative was initiated by an account on Twitter, which shared an image that resembled a screenshot of a tweet by a news outlet. 

The headline in the screenshot reads, "Father of murderer girl, 9, at Covenant school shooting, calls for "an end to tolerance" in family statement to the press, vowing "to fight with every fiber of my being for the end of the trans evil. The evil that took my daughter. There must be a solution to this evil in America." While this post was subsequently deleted by its author, in the space of a few hours, it was retweeted over 400 times and liked by more than 3,400 Twitter users.

The image in question was designed to resemble a tweet posted by an account belonging to WSMV4, a local Nashville news station. The tweet is fake, and WSMV4 has confirmed that it did not originate from their account.

In Fact

To determine whether such a tweet was posted by WSMV4, Logically reviewed the outlet's Twitter feed and other social media pages. No such content could be found on either live or archived versions of these accounts. 

WSMV4 has since publicly denied that its Twitter account has published content resembling this image. On March 30, the outlet tweeted a blurred version with the caption, "This Tweet is fake. WSMV4 did not post this," confirming that the outlet had no involvement in the circulation of this narrative. 

Logically searched for national news that included the statement shown in the fake tweet. This revealed that this statement has never been reported by a reputable outlet as genuine and that it first appeared in this tweet. 

The Verdict

The news organization that this tweet was attributed to has confirmed that it is fake. There is no record of a parent affected by the recent tragedy in Nashville making any statement that resembles the one being shared online. This claim has therefore been marked as false.