A fake tweet spurred an anti-vaccine harassment campaign against a doctor

When Dr. Natalia Solenkova woke up Monday morning, she was greeted with a flood of Twitter notifications on her phone. The Miami critical care physician had hundreds of new followers, and they, along with thousands of others on Twitter, were angry with her.

In tweets, comments and direct messages across Twitter and other social platforms, strangers demanded to know why she had deleted a tweet that read: “I will never regret the vaccine. Even if it turns out I injected actual poison and have only days to live. My heart and is was in the right place. I got vaccinated out of love, while antivaxxers did everything out of hate. If I have to die because of my love for the world, then so be it. But I will never regret or apologize for it.”

Solenkova hadn’t deleted the tweet. In fact, she hadn’t written it at all. It was what misinformation researchers call a “cheap fake,” a term for a piece of fake media such as an image or video that takes little effort to produce. Someone had clumsily altered one of Solenkova’s posts to portray a blind, even deadly, zealotry for Covid vaccines and a vilification of anti-vaccine activists.