Paul Pelosi, the husband of US House of Representatives Speaker Nancy Pelosi, was attacked by a hammer-wielding intruder at the couple’s San Francisco home in the early hours of Friday.
Within hours of the attack, a series of unsubstantiated claims began circulating in fringe far-right circles that contradicted the official police account of how the attack unfolded.
Those misleading claims have since gone viral after being amplified by new Twitter chief Elon Musk and a number of conservative influencers.
BBC News examines some of the claims about the attack.
One of the most viral false claims about the attack suggests that Mr Pelosi, 82, and his attacker David DePape, 42, were in a same-sex relationship and had a drunken quarrel.
A series of baseless assumptions that do not match official accounts of the incident have been used to support the narrative.
These claims started to trend in the US after Elon Musk tweeted an article from a website featuring similar claims to his 112 million followers on Sunday, before deleting his tweet without any explanation hours later.
“There is a tiny possibility there might be more to this story than meets the eye,” Mr Musk had said in response to a tweet by former Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton.
The website Mr Musk linked to has a history of publishing inaccurate stories, including an article from 2016 that claimed Hillary Clinton was dead.
One of the claims made online is that both Mr DePape...
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