Did Ayanna Pressley Tweet, ‘IQ Is a Measure of Whiteness’?

On Jan. 17, 2023, Twitter user @DVATW tweeted, “Hi @AyannaPressley – Can you please explain what this means? Thanks.” The screenshot under the tweet, which was poor quality, appeared to show that Rep. Ayanna Pressley, D-Mass., had tweeted from an iPhone, “IQ is a measure of whiteness.” The date showed as June 15, 2021.

We did not find any record of this tweet on Pressley’s Twitter account. We checked both the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine and also archive.today. Both websites exist to archive websites, as their names indicate.

We also found no reporting about the words in the tweet anywhere online, at least according to a Google search. For example, no political blogs, whether left-leaning or right-leaning, reported anything about the words, “IQ is a measure of whiteness.”

We reached out to Pressley’s office to ask about the rumor and will update this story if we receive a response.

The same screenshot that appeared in @DVATW’s tweet was added to iFunny.co on Jan. 17. It was also posted one day later on Jan. 18 on the r/PoliticalCompassMemes subreddit on Reddit.

With these two appearances on iFunny.co and Reddit being brand new, this appeared to indicate that the tweet was fake, as a message from June 15, 2021 would have surfaced long before now.

At the same time, we noticed that on June 22, 2021, which would have been seven days after the purported tweet went up, the @RickKeating8 account tweeted, “Iq is a measure of whiteness. Omg. Omg. Omg. Ahahahah. I recomend google the meaning of word IQ. #AyanePressley.”

Also, on June 23, Twitter user @Owlikzander angrily tweeted a quote that they had apparently attributed to Pressley, which read, “IQ is a measure of whiteness in a country where I hold governmental power and fucking Indians, Asians, and Jews ALL have a higher IQ and make more money than whites.”

A search for this much longer message yielded no results, according to Google.

We then located a forum post on econjobrumors.com that included a link to a tweet from the suspended Twitter account @LivingScribe, which showed a screenshot of the purported Pressley tweet being pinned on the congresswoman’s profile as of June 18, 2021.

Was the tweet created as a fake by @LivingScribe or someone else, or did Pressley actually put out the tweet? We’re still looking for answers before establishing a firm rating.

This story will be updated once our research is complete.

Sources:

@DVATW. Twitter, 17 Jan. 2023, https://twitter.com/dvatw/status/1615405919944478720.

“‘IQ Is a Measure of Whiteness.'” Economics Job Market Rumors, 2021, https://www.econjobrumors.com/topic/%e2%80%9ciq-is-a-measure-of-whiteness%e2%80%9d-103k-likes.

@LivingScribe. Twitter via Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine, 18 June 2021, https://web.archive.org/web/20210618230758/https://twitter.com/LivingScribe/status/1406025855680368647.

PossiblyEissenland. “IQ Is a Measure of Whiteness.” iFunny.co, 17 Jan. 2023, https://ifunny.co/picture/ayanna-pressiey-ayannapressiey-iq-is-a-measure-of-whiteness-am-5D7ndQBCA.

u/sri_mahalingam. “bUT ThAt’s NOt REAl Lib-Left!” r/PoliticalCompassMemes via Reddit.com, 18 Jan. 2023, https://www.reddit.com/r/PoliticalCompassMemes/comments/10ffrym/but_thats_not_real_libleft/.

“Woke-Racist Unity | /r/PoliticalCompassMemes | Political Compass.” Know Your Meme, https://knowyourmeme.com/photos/2128302-political-compass.