Did Rudy Giuliani tweet comment about “China Virus” and “barnyard animals”? Fact Check

A screenshot on social media purports to show an October 2020 tweet made by Rudy Giuliani claiming he suspects people who contract COVID-19 had “sex with barnyard animals” is circulating.

The screenshot is spreading on social media amid news that Rudy Giuliani, President Trump’s personal lawyer, has himself contracted COVID-19.

FALSE

An example is below.

“I think it’s highly likely that all these people that have contracted the China Virus got it from having sex with barnyard animals”

Despite the screenshot, it appears that Giuliani made no such tweet. We searched Giuliani’s Twitter feed and no such tweet appears for the stated date October 20th 2020.

Of course one could argue that it’s possible that Giuliani deleted the tweet after public pushback or after he himself contracted COVID-19, but this seems unlikely. That’s because we searched both Twitter and Google for words related to the tweet, and could find no results dating back further than (at the time of writing) 18 hours, which would have been around the time the news broke that Giuliani had contracted COVID-19.

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In fact we could find no tweet mentioning both “Rudy Giuliani” and “barnyard animals” during either October or November, with a sudden surge of results in the last 18 hours. Additionally no media stories reported on the tweet, which would be highly unusual given its controversial nature.

As such, to believe the tweet was real, one would have to assume that not a single person on Twitter copied (either fully or partly) the text of Giuliani’s tweet, and that not a single news organisation or blog reported on it for two months from when it was purportedly published.

As such, we rank this screenshot of a tweet as false.

Screenshots that show fake tweets are a common type of misinformation that spread online, and that’s largely because there are a number of online prank tools that allow someone to create such fake tweets that appear to come from just about any Twitter account. As such we generally recommend not trusting any screenshot of a tweet.