A photo purporting to show the man who recently stabbed Derek Chauvin, the police officer in Minneapolis convicted of killing George Floyd in 2020, has been circulating widely online. Chauvin was stabbed 22 times by ex-gang member John Turscak while the two were in federal prison in Arizona. But the photo that’s gone viral doesn’t show Turscak. It’s just a businessman who recently passed away in Georgia.
The image seemed to be getting the most traction on X, the platform formerly known as Twitter, on Saturday after being tweeted by an account called @superloafcat.
“THIS GUY stabbed derek chauvin 22 times?? dude got got by the kindest sweetest looking man,” the tweet reads.
That tweet alone has been viewed over 350,000 times as of this writing and is clearly gaining momentum on the site. Unfortunately Community Notes, the crowdsourced fact-checking program, has yet to point out the tweet is wrong.
The image has also appeared on Reddit and a website called Celebs Week, which has misidentified the man in the photo as well. Other X accounts that haven’t gotten as much exposure have also shared the image falsely identifying it as Turscak, though it appears more blue checkmark accounts have started to distribute the image—a problem because anyone who pays $8 for a blue checkmark now gets artificially boosted by X’s algorithm.
Using reverse-image search tools I was able to determine the photo actually shows John ‘Shelby’ Amos II, a 71-year-old man who passed away this week in...
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