Former New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s campaign came under fire after posting a series of now-deleted tweets that included fake quotes of 2020 Democratic front-runner Sen. Bernie Sanders praising authoritarianism.
As Common Dreams reported, Sanders’ comments praising former Cuban President Fidel Castro for literacy programs in the island nation echoed remarks made about the Cuban leader by former President Barack Obama just four years ago. Both Sanders and Obama denounced authoritarian rule in Cuba while acknowledging the Castro government oversaw major advances in its education and universal healthcare systems, leading to better health outcomes for Cubans.
Bloomberg’s campaign, however, compared Sanders’ remarks to made-up statements attributed to the Vermont senator about former Ugandan President Idi Amin, Soviet leader Josef Stalin, North Korean leader Kim Jong-un, and others.

The Bloomberg campaign deleted the tweets and said they were meant to be satirical, but The Guardian reported that some social media users said the campaign had not made clear that the quotes weren’t real when they posted them using the hashtag #BernieOnDespots.
Sanders’ press secretary, Briahna Joy Gray, called the tweets a “string of intentional outright lies.”
David Sirota, a speechwriter for the senator, slammed Bloomberg’s team over the tweets — which, he noted, followed complaints from Bloomberg about the online “toxicity” allegedly supported by Sanders’ campaign.
https://twitter.com/davidsirota/status/1232154163691175938
The tweets were posted three days after Twitter announced it was suspending 70 accounts that have posted identical messages in support of Bloomberg in recent weeks.
The Bloomberg campaign has also been ridiculed for hiring people to post messages on social media in favor of the former mayor, paying them $2,500 per month — a tactic which UCLA professor Tim Groeling told the Los Angeles Times “signified his lack of organic grassroots support.”
We’re not backing down in the face of Trump’s threats.
As Donald Trump is inaugurated a second time, independent media organizations are faced with urgent mandates: Tell the truth more loudly than ever before. Do that work even as our standard modes of distribution (such as social media platforms) are being manipulated and curtailed by forces of fascist repression and ruthless capitalism. Do that work even as journalism and journalists face targeted attacks, including from the government itself. And do that work in community, never forgetting that we’re not shouting into a faceless void – we’re reaching out to real people amid a life-threatening political climate.
Our task is formidable, and it requires us to ground ourselves in our principles, remind ourselves of our utility, dig in and commit.
As a dizzying number of corporate news organizations – either through need or greed – rush to implement new ways to further monetize their content, and others acquiesce to Trump’s wishes, now is a time for movement media-makers to double down on community-first models.
At Truthout, we are reaffirming our commitments on this front: We won’t run ads or have a paywall because we believe that everyone should have access to information, and that access should exist without barriers and free of distractions from craven corporate interests. We recognize the implications for democracy when information-seekers click a link only to find the article trapped behind a paywall or buried on a page with dozens of invasive ads. The laws of capitalism dictate an unending increase in monetization, and much of the media simply follows those laws. Truthout and many of our peers are dedicating ourselves to following other paths – a commitment which feels vital in a moment when corporations are evermore overtly embedded in government.
Over 80 percent of Truthout‘s funding comes from small individual donations from our community of readers, and the remaining 20 percent comes from a handful of social justice-oriented foundations. Over a third of our total budget is supported by recurring monthly donors, many of whom give because they want to help us keep Truthout barrier-free for everyone.
You can help by giving today. Whether you can make a small monthly donation or a larger gift, Truthout only works with your support.