By Julia Conley – February 26, 2020
Former New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s campaign came under fire after posting a series of now-deleted tweets that included fake quotes of 2020 Democratic front-runner Sen. Bernie Sanders praising authoritarianism.
As Common Dreams reported, Sanders’ comments praising former Cuban President Fidel Castro for literacy programs in the island nation echoed remarks made about the Cuban leader by former President Barack Obama just four years ago. Both Sanders and Obama denounced authoritarian rule in Cuba while acknowledging the Castro government oversaw major advances in its education and universal healthcare systems, leading to better health outcomes for Cubans.
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Bloomberg’s campaign, however, compared Sanders’ remarks to made-up statements attributed to the Vermont senator about former Ugandan President Idi Amin, Soviet leader Josef Stalin, North Korean leader Kim Jong-un, and others.
The Bloomberg campaign deleted the tweets and said they were meant to be satirical, but The Guardian reported that some social media users said the campaign had not made clear that the quotes weren’t real when they posted them using the hashtag #BernieOnDespots.
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Sanders’ press secretary, Briahna Joy Gray, called the tweets a “string of intentional outright lies.”
David Sirota, a speechwriter for the senator, slammed Bloomberg’s team over the tweets — which, he noted, followed complaints from Bloomberg about the online “toxicity” allegedly supported by Sanders’ campaign.
https://twitter.com/davidsirota/status/1232154163691175938
The tweets were posted three days after Twitter announced it was suspending 70 accounts that have posted identical messages in support of Bloomberg in recent weeks.
The Bloomberg campaign has also been ridiculed for hiring people to post messages on social media in favor of the former mayor, paying them $2,500 per month — a tactic which UCLA professor Tim Groeling told the Los Angeles Times “signified his lack of organic grassroots support.”
Featured image: Democratic presidential hopeful and former New York Mayor Mike Bloomberg arrives for the 10th Democratic primary debate of the 2020 presidential campaign season co-hosted by CBS News and the Congressional Black Caucus Institute at the Gaillard Center in Charleston, South Carolina, on February 25, 2020.
LOGAN CYRUS / AFP VIA GETTY IMAGES
