Hilo man’s identity stolen to smear Vice Presidential candidate Tim Walz

HONOLULU (HawaiiNewsNow) – A Hawaii man says he was disgusted and angry to be caught up in a viral internet smear against Vice Presidential candidate Tim Walz.
Russian hackers are being blamed for stealing Matthew Metro’s identity to falsely accuse Walz of sexual assault.
Matthew Metro was a student at West Mankato high school 27 years ago, when Tim Walz taught and coached there, but he said Walz wasn’t his teacher and certainly never sexually assaulted him and is trying to get the fake story under control.
“It disgusts me,” Metro told Hawaii News Now. “It makes me feel very, very awful about the fact that people are trying to manipulate our elections and using innocent people to do it with.”
U.S. intelligence officials say it looks like Russian hackers got Metro’s name and picture from the high school yearbook, then used someone with a vague resemblance to accuse Walz — a coach and teacher then — of sexual assault.
Before it was taken down as fake, the video got over 5 million views. Washington Post reporter Jon Swaine tracked down the real Matthew Metro in Hilo.
“There was a man with this name, but that he looked quite different, so that sort of set us off looking,” Swaine said, adding that the video was clumsy and not a “deep fake” product of Artificial Intelligence.
The Washington Post story confirmed the fraud, with the help of Metro’s courage to go public.
“I think lots of people’s instinct would be to sort of go to ground and not respond,” Swaine said.
“Oh no. I was too pissed to do that. I was too upset,” Metro said, adding that going public was an easy decision.
Metro, 45, is disabled and unable to work, and says except for a deluge of messages from investigators and media outlets, his life hasn’t been affected so far.
“So, I hope that my name isn’t attached to this anytime in the future, and that’s why I wanted to speak out to the press and get this real story out,” he said.
The fake video was only one of several similarly false stories put out on various platforms about Walz. The Russian goals were apparently to damage his reputation and disrupt the election, Swaine said.
“Because while some people will believe it, some people will be kind of angered that there’s such obvious fakery going on in the election, and start to mistrust other sources of information.”
Metro says the experience has reconfirmed his plan to support the Harris and Walz ticket, because of the lies targeting them and victimizing him.
“The blatant disregard for the fact that I am a person, that they used an image of me,” he said. “I didn’t approve it, and I didn’t want it to be used, so I was kind of enraged.”
Walz has not commented on the disinformation campaign which briefly got traction among Trump supporters.
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