The Viral Tweet About Dr. Fauci Buying $18 Million House Appears Completely Made Up

A tweet wrongly claiming that Dr. Anthony Fauci bought an $18.9 million home stood uncorrected for hours while angry users made threatening comments targeting the top infectious diseases expert and longtime government scientist.

The tweet about Fauci, who served as chief medical advisor to President Donald Trump during the Covid pandemic and retired after decades working for the U.S. government a few months ago, claimed he bought an “Exclusive 150 Acre Luxury Retreat On The Potomac” rumored to cost “$18.9 Million.”

Within hours, the baseless claim racked up millions of views, as well as thousands of angry replies accusing the renowned scientist of profiting off of the pandemic.

Eventually, a community note was posted to the tweet:

There is no evidence to support the claim Dr. Fauci bought a new home on the Potomac.

The photo above was featured in a June 2022 interview conducted at Fauci’s home in D.C., where he has lived since 1977, and was part of a series for The Washington Post Magazine.

As of this writing, the original tweet is still up:

The tweet is yet another example demonstrating how Twitter has become more unreliable since the platform was taken over by Elon Musk last year.

His abolishing verified accounts in favor of a paid “blue check” system has allowed for rampant fakery, including users posing as elected officials. Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) found herself the subject of a Twitter impersonator who had a flirtatious exchange with Musk himself.  The account labeled itself “(parody)” but had a recognizable blue check. That account no longer exists, but there are plenty of others. (And legitimate comedy parodies will also always exist — and fool people.)

Twitter’s real-time nature has always been a double-edged sword, providing up-to-the-minute information and news that may or may not be verified to be true, or may appear without the proper context. During the military mutiny in Russia last week, for example, a pro-Ukraine Twitter account posted rapid-fire misinformation that reliably went viral. The account, like so many others that spew misinformation, has a blue check.

But tweets like the one featuring Fauci are a willful distribution of misinformation, something that the European Union has warned Musk about since he instituted his absolutist “free speech” policies. In April, the Associated Press reported that authoritarian governments would directly benefit from Twitter’s looser policies:

The platform is no longer labeling state-controlled media and propaganda agencies, and will no longer prohibit their content from being automatically promoted or recommended to users. Together, the two changes, both made in recent weeks, have supercharged the Kremlin’s ability to use the U.S.-based platform to spread lies and misleading claims about its invasion of Ukraine, U.S. politics and other topics.

Russian state media accounts are now earning 33% more views than they were just weeks ago, before the change was made, according to findings released Monday by Reset, a London-based non-profit that tracks authoritarian governments’ use of social media to spread propaganda. Reset’s findings were first reported by The Associated Press.

It might be alarmist to call the Fauci tweet “propaganda,” but it is clearly bare-faced misinformation intended to turn people against Fauci and the role he played during the Covid pandemic. As the 2024 campaign season heats up, tweets like this will only increase, and it will be up to Twitter to decide to what extent it wants to allow the proliferation of fake news.

This is an opinion piece. The views expressed in this article are those of just the author.