Stephen King Shamed for Pushing Fake News, Blames Someone Else Entirely When He's Called Out

Best-selling horror novelist Stephen King was forced to apologize to his 6.7 million followers on 🐦Twitter over a false story he had posted on Wednesday about Republican Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis. The following day, a left-leaning fact-check site judged King’s post to be false.

In a now-deleted tweet, King wrote that DeSantis had signed a bill “requiring Florida students, professors to register political views with state,” according to PolitiFact. The fact-check found that King’s claim “copied the headline of a June 2021 article published by Salon.” They noted that the headline has now been changed.

This misinformation related to Florida House Bill 233 which “requires the states’ public colleges and universities to ‘conduct an annual assessment of the intellectual freedom and viewpoint diversity,’ using a survey developed by the State Board of Education or the Board of Governors.”

Following a lengthy explanation, PolitiFact wrote: “We rate King’s statement False.”

The Daily Wire reported that the caption on King’s original tweet, which included a link to the Salon article, read: “I. Can’t. Even.”

Frankly, I. Can’t. Even. believe King was taken in by such a spurious story. I suppose he trusted Salon to give him a fair and accurate account of what happened. Still, I would expect King, who is 74 and a highly acclaimed writer, to be more discerning than this.

At any rate, he apologized to his followers in the tweet below.