So, at the year’s end, let’s doff our caps to the wild hoaxes, rumors, memes, and outright fabrications we’ve had to sift through, debunk, and vivisect for the public good over the last 12 months. The world can be a discouraging place these days, but as we head into 2020, let us reflect on our social media sins and humbly hope to never make the same dumb mistakes twice.

May your holidays be sweet, your sources be real, and your conspiracy-minded relatives slower to retweet.

1. So-called ‘Somali gangs’ turned out not to be Somali

National news zoomed in on Minnesota in September when a group of young men brutally attacked and robbed a few pedestrians in downtown Minneapolis. Without any kind of evidence, social media commenters, pundits, and even Tucker Carlson’s conservative outlet, the Daily Caller, blamed the violence on a so-called “Somali mob.”

Later, Sahan Journal, a nonprofit publication covering Minnesota’s immigrant and refugee communities, actually asked Minneapolis police about it. A department spokesperson said there was “no indication” any of the suspects were Somali. The Caller eventually issued a correction.

City Pages reported on the gaffe, but commenters on the story still insisted “crime is up due to… refugees” and that the story was “more liberal lies.”

2. The ‘8-10 Somali Teens Armed with Hammers’ attack that never existed

In May, University of Minnesota police responded to a group of Somali teens allegedly brandishing metal pipes and intimidating bystanders at the East Bank light rail station. Police confronted seven kids, arrested two, and confiscated some pipes. Not a lot of local outlets paid much attention to the incident.

That didn’t stop conservative news outlets from turning it into the crime of the century, involving “a mob of eight to 10 males wielding hammers.” Social media commenters and right-wing blogs accused mainstream media of covering up a “gang assault,” surely the work of “toxic, radical Islam.”

3. Jacob Wohl’s fake death threat

In March, right-wing activists Jacob Wohl and Laura Loomer came to Minneapolis to film a documentary about Rep. Ilhan Omar, which mostly amounted to playing a lot of scary music, knocking on locked doors, and otherwise failing to contact Omar. They also reported a supposed death threat against them, posted on a Twitter account under the name “Drake Holmes.” “Holmes” promised if he ever saw them in the city he’d “shoot [them] and shit on [their] fucking bodies.” The profile picture featured a smiling man in a suit.

Drake Holmes, it turns out, is not a real person—which we probably could have guessed by the fact that he spelled his name wrong in his own Twitter handle. The man in the photo is actually named Aaron Delgado. He’s a home mortgage specialist in Minneapolis, and somebody swiped his image off his Instagram account. He said he doesn’t follow politics and he had no idea who Wohl was. Several journalists reported there was evidence that Wohl may have created the account himself.

4. Ilhan Omar omnibus

Speaking of Omar, she was the subject of more than her fair share of fake news this year, including false accusations that she gleefully partied to Lizzo on 9/11, or that she was photographed in “Jihad training,” or in a mask at the Minneapolis Trump rally protest in October. She didn’t, she wasn’t, and Omar herself commented that it would have been hard for that masked person in the photo to be her with her being in Morocco and all. That’s on top of all the perennial rumors and hoaxes surrounding the representative, which we covered in greater (depressing) detail here.

5. Darla Shine’s cancer-fighting measles

In February, Darla Shine—wife of former Fox News executive and then high-ranking Trump official Bill Shine—took to Twitter to explain that measles, an exquisitely contagious viral disease that killed hundreds of thousands of people in 2017, was good for you and could “fight cancer.” She cited a study from Minnesota’s own Mayo Clinic for her claims.

The study was actually about two patients being treated for cancer with virotherapy in 2014. The virus in question was a highly modified, Frankensteined strain of measles, essentially stripped of everything harmful to the human body and pumped full of life-saving medicine. Chemotherapy patients have such weakened immune systems that the manufactured virus could traipse right to the affected cells unhindered.

Your average, run-of-the-mill measles, however? Not nearly as useful. We all but wiped out the disease by 2000 with intense vaccination programs for a reason. That makes it especially worrying that we recently saw outbreaks of the stuff in Washington and Oregon. Get your shots, people.

6. April Sellers’ fake hate mail

In January, Minneapolis dancer and choreographer April Sellers successfully sued a New York Couple—Kevin Powell and Jinah Parker—who had publicly called her out for sending them a critical letter two years ago.

Except Sellers never sent them that letter. That came from a totally different April Sellers who lived in Ohio. The Minneapolis April Sellers had never heard of Powell and Parker before. That hadn’t stopped them from sending an open letter to dozens of Twin Cities journalists calling her out for her supposed “racist privilege” and “racist condescension.”

Sellers reached out to the couple to let them know there had been a mistake, but they didn’t respond. After a dramatic court case, Sellers walked away with $210,000 in damages, and Powell vowed to appeal.

7. Trump rally omnibus

President Donald Trump’s arrival in Minneapolis in October brought with it a slew of half-truths, outright lies, and bad photoshop—so much of it that we had to give it its own roundup shortly after the rally.

Peruse at your leisure these fake photos of crowds lining up to see the president, generous attendance estimates, tales of missing toilets, fake interview bans, and aforementioned photographic “evidence” that Omar attended the protest outside the venue.

8. The drag queen who did not flash a bunch of kids at a Minneapolis library

The Hennepin County Public Library system’s popular drag queen story hour came under fire from a bunch of angry internet commenters in October when somebody took a photo of a drag queen bending down to get a book, showing a glimpse of tan shorts under their colorful minidress. Conservative Facebook groups and bloggers claimed the performer—Sasha Sota—was “flashing” the young audience.

In reality, they were wearing something like “five” layers of leggings, and had merely forgotten to add the mostly cosmetic layer of underwear over them. That didn’t stop a hoard of angry strangers from storming Sasha’s Facebook page and harassing library staff over the phone. It definitely didn’t help when, a month later, Minnesota House Rep. Mary Franson (R-Alexandria) wrote a letter to the Perham Focus claiming drag queens are not “appropriate” library programming for kids.

9. The MAGA craft brewery we never had

In September, the Twitter account of St. Paul’s Flat Earth Brewing retweeted a post from Trump about his campaign rally in Ohio.

There were a few things wrong with this picture right off the bat. Not only is there no such thing as Flat Earth Brewing anymore (the brewery rebranded to St. Paul Brewing in March), the company no longer uses Twitter. But their account still exists, and someone else is apparently enjoying it.

Director of operations Jaclyn Semlak told City Pages the brewery couldn’t remember the last time they had actually had control of the account, and said that as a business, they don’t “affiliate with any political [party].”



10. Honorable mentions

Honestly, keep it to 10? No list would be complete without the following weird hills various Minnesotans have chosen to die on: