Erica Marsh routinely drew the ire of conservatives and basically any sane user on X, with 'her' incendiary far-left and hyper-partisan posts. It turns out it's a fake account, the creator of which remains unknown.
Marsh’s top post, with more than 27 million views, claimed that “No black person will be able to succeed in a merit-based system,” after the United States Supreme Court struck down the racist affirmative action law in June. The fake X account routinely compared Republicans to pedophiles and conservative Supreme Court justices to Nazis.
Marsh started facing closer scrutiny after her outlandish Supreme Court post on X attracted the attention of popular Florida Republican Congressman Matt Gaetz who replied, “I strongly disagree with this racist allegation.”
Photo of a smiling young woman with blond hair topped Erica Marsh’s X account which has nearly 130 000 followers. "Proud Democrat: Former Field Organizer to elect President Biden," Marsh's X bio reads. "Volunteer for the Obama Foundatio. (She/Her)." One problem, the profile picture actually belongs to a real person, an unsuspecting American woman.
The picture belongs to Courtney Ballesteros, a 26-year-old wife and mother of two living in Ruskin, Florida, a rural town south of Tampa. It's a decade-old photo from when she was a teen. She's a registered Republican and voted for former President Donald Trump in the 2020 presidential election.
Ballesteros told CNN she first heard about Erica Marsh in March, when her friends brought it to her attention. She immediately recognized the pictures as ones she posted to her public Facebook page.
“I could not believe what I saw,” she told CNN, as she read through many of Marsh’s inflammatory posts. “I knew it was nothing that I would ever say.”
“I was just shocked that my face was behind the words,” she added.
The creator of the 'Erica Marsh' account which has since been suspended by X, remains a mystery.
Critics however pointed out that the creator was successful for that long in fooling X users because her vitriolic rhetoric is not uncommon among far-left extremists on social media who often escape punishment on big tech platforms. Marsh's account would still be active today if Elon Musk did not acquire Twitter(now X), critics claim.
Some social media users and expert observers argue that 'Erica Marsh' was a part of an ongoing operation by foreign agents to interfere in US politics and sow further political division especially in the lead up to the 2024 presidential elections. Marsh was an gent provocateur of sort, they argue.
WATCH Courtney Ballesteros' remarks to CNN