CLAIM: A collection of screenshots shows Texas Sen. Ted Cruz tweeting identical messages after 12 mass shootings in the United States between 2012 and 2022.
AP RATING: False. The image begins with an actual message that Cruz tweeted after Tuesday’s shooting at an elementary school in Uvalde, Texas, but the next 11 tweets were created to appear to be using exactly the same message with a different city name each. once. A search of Cruz’s active Twitter accounts, web files and a database of deleted tweets shows that he did not tweet the same message over and over again.
THE FACTS: In the days following the mass shooting in Uvalde in which a gunman fatally shot 19 children and two teachers, some social media users express frustration with the frequency of mass shootings in the US and criticize officials’ responses.
A post circulated later falsely claimed that Cruz, a Republican senator, had been recycling identical messages in support of the victims after other massacres, changing only the name of the city where the mass shootings took place each time.
The post includes an image showing 12 allegedly tweets from Cruz. The first screenshot reads: “Heidi and I are fervently raising children and families in prayer in the horrific shooting in Uvalde. We are in close contact with the local authorities, but the precise details are still being developed. Thanks to the heroic law enforcement and those responsible for acting so quickly. “
The other tweets shown use the same text but replace “Uvalde” with different locations. Locations listed include New York, Sacramento, Indianapolis, Rochester, El Paso, Virginia Beach, Pittsburgh, Parkland, Las Vegas, Orlando and Newtown. The timestamp of each tweet also changes.
“These mass shootings happen so much that Ted Cruz really had a template ready to tweet whenever they happen,” a Twitter user said Thursday, including the photo that was intended to show a collection of nearly identical posts. The tweet had gotten over 16,000 retweets and 40,000 likes by Friday morning.
The text of the first tweet, which shows Cruz’s response to Uvalde, is real. But the screenshot date was incorrect. Cruz tweeted his message on May 24, not May 25.
The other alleged tweets included in the image are inaccurate, according to advanced Twitter searches and web file checks such as the WayBack Machine and a ProPublica database that includes Cruz’s deleted tweets since 2013.
Although Cruz has used some phrases several times in tweets about mass shootings, such as “stand up in prayer” and address the “community” and “first responders,” he has not used an identical template.
And Cruz did not tweet anything from his personal Twitter account or senator’s account in response to the mass shootings in Sacramento, Indianapolis, Rochester, Virginia Beach and Parkland.
The dates in the fabricated screenshot that falsely claim to show Cruz’s responses to the Buffalo and Rochester shootings are also incorrect. The date for the Buffalo shootout is April 2022, when the shooting took place the following month, in May. And the Rochester shooting appears as September 2021, but that shooting took place the year before, in 2020.
A Cruz spokesman did not immediately respond to a request for comment by email.
___
This is part of AP’s effort to address widely shared misinformation, including working with outside companies and organizations to add real context to misleading content circulating online. Learn more about AP fact checking.