JK Rowling Deletes Tweet; Fake Video Showed Trump Snub Of Kid In Wheelchair

J.K. Rowling, the author of the Harry Potter series whose favored storyline in more recent days has been "Author Takes On Liar President," came under fire after a series of tweets she posted of a video that showed President Trump ignoring a 3-year-old boy in a wheelchair. The scene, though, was not real. The video had been selectively edited.

Trump, in fact, did acknowledge the little boy. And when Rowling's scam was revealed — poof! — the offending video, which she had posted on Twitter, suddenly disappeared.

The video stemmed from a July 24 press conference that Trump held regarding health care. The White House had invited several people who say they have been hurt by the Affordable Care Act, or Obamacare. The 3-year-old, Montgomery Weer of South Carolina, has spina bifada.

In the edited video, Trump appeared to have ignored the boy's outstretched hand. An archived version of the tweets show Rowling shared the video with a quote by Maya Angelou: "When someone shows you who they are, believe them."

Rowling deleted the tweets after receiving a huge amount of criticism. Piers Morgan, the conservative columnist for the Daily Mail, repeatedly called on Rowling to delete the tweets and apologize to the president.

"My mother used a wheelchair. I witnessed people uncomfortable around her disability, but if they had a shred of decency they got over it," one of her tweets said. "So, yes, that clip of Trump looking deliberately over a child's head, ignoring his outstretched hand, has touched me on the raw." (See the full series of tweets here.)

Chelsea Clinton, who had retweeted Rowling, also deleted the tweet after she faced criticism.

Official White House footage shows that Trump did indeed bend down to greet the boy just before he delivered his remarks. The fact-checking website Politifact gave Rowling's claim a "Pants on Fire" rating, saying she reacted to only a snippet of the video and did not take the entire event into consideration.

On Monday, Rowling acknowledged that the edited video she tweeted was not a full and accurate representation of what happened. She apologized for any distress it may have caused the boy or his family.

Rowling's original tweet received more than 75,000 retweets. Her tweets apologizing for the false tweets received significantly fewer retweets.

A case study by the New York Times examining a false tweet about paid protesters being bused into Austin for a protest against Trump showed that the false claim was shared thousands of times, leading to a nationwide conspiracy theory. A subsequent tweet correcting the false claim received just 29 retweets and 27 likes. The piece demonstrated the rapidity with which false news spreads and the significantly less attention that is given to corrections of false and misleading information.

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