The reply happened in Sept. 2022 on Tyler Idol’s account, which she now has pinned to her page, and was unearthed by some right-wing dork on X Wednesday. The reply is now deleted, but according to saved recordings, it simply stated “Wow” and was accompanied by two smiling faces with hearts emoji. As for how you can tell it was from RFK Jr.’s TikTok account, it’s pretty obvious as the avatar is of the anti-vaxxer, and clicking on it took you to the official TikTok page for his campaign.
“Do people really think I was TikToking in 2022,” his post says. “This comment now appears on my account because the account was previously owned by one of the campaign’s young social media managers.”
I’ve always found it weird how Americans mandate putting punctuation inside quotes at all times.
It does appear that he has a point as the first video on his TikTok account was uploaded in May 2023, which was a month after he officially declared he was running for office. That was back when he was calling himself a Democrat, only to pivot to running as an independent candidate last October, and then to consider going for the libertarian ticket earlier this week. Mind you, former President Donald Trump’s camp did reach out at some point to discuss the anti-vaxxer as a VP pick. With such variable political leanings, maybe he should just run on the TikTok ticket.
I’m on board with original punctuation going inside the quote, but then to be consistent, capitalization has to as well. So instead of “This comment…” it should be “this comment…” since in the original quote that was just a clause separated by a comma, not its own sentence.
I usually try to avoid that scenario and put the first character in brackets if I absolutely need to do that.