Donald Trump has denied that he ever denied climate change – but the evidence that he did is still on his Twitter, despite some reports.

At the first presidential debate, Mr Trump told the audience that he had never denied global warming. When Hillary Clinton brought up the fact that he had once claimed that climate change was a hoax made up by the Chinese, he claimed it was untrue and he had never said it.

But a tweet is still on his Twitter account that proves otherwise. “The concept of global warming was created by and for the Chinese in order to make US manufacturing non-competitive,” he wrote on 11 June, 2012.

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Many rushed to share the post, which proved that Mr Trump was wrong. But then falsehoods took hold in that fact-checking process, and yet more untruths started to be shared.

A number of people claimed that Trump’s campaign was deleting the tweet as it was being posted. One user called Sophie Bush wrote that Mr Trump’s “cronies just deleted this” but shared it in a screengrab – and gained tens of thousands of retweets for doing so – while others shared a post that seemed to show the tweet being deleted in real time.

But the tweet is still on Twitter, at the time of publication. And so are a range of other, similar posts.

“The problem w/ the concept of ‘global warming’ is that the US is spending a fortune on ‘fixing it’ while China & others do nothing!” he wrote on 5 December, 2013.

Just over a week later, he wrote “We should be focusing on beautiful, clean air & not on wasteful & very expensive GLOBAL WARMING bullshit! China & others are hurting our air”.

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