Fact Check: Rush Limbaugh Has NOT Been Suspended From Twitter -- Deleted Own Account

Fact Check

  • by: Maarten Schenk
Fact Check: Rush Limbaugh Has NOT Been Suspended From Twitter -- Deleted Own Account He Deleted It

Was radio host Rush Limbaugh suspended from Twitter in the wake of President Trump's suspension from the plaform? No, that's not true: in an email to Lead Stories, Twitter has confirmed it was the user behind the @RealRLimbaugh account who deleted it. At the time of writing there is no statement about the deletion on Limbaugh's site but it is likely one will appear shortly.

The claim went viral on social media, for example via this Facebook post (archived here) published on January 9, 2021 which read:

Rush Limbaugh, who is dying of stage 4 cancer, has been suspended from Twitter.

This is what the post looked like on Facebook at the time of writing:

Facebook screenshot

(Source: Facebook screenshot taken on Sat Jan 9 10:36:53 2021 UTC)

Limbaugh's account @RealRLimbaugh is indeed inactive at the time of writing. The last snapshot taken by The Internet Archive that showed the account as active dates from January 7, 2021 (with the last archived tweet being from December 17, 2020).

The timing in the wake of the suspension of the Twitter account of President Donald Trump by Twitter led many to believe the platform had taken the same action against Limbaugh's account.

Lead Stories reached out to Twitter to inquire what happened with Limbaugh's account and received following reply from the Head of Policy Communications, APAC:

It was not a suspension. The user deactivated the account.

This was confirmed by Joseph Wulfsohn from Fox News in a tweet:

We have reached out to Rush Limbaugh as well but we did not receive a reply at press time. This story will be updated when we know more.

This fact check is available at IFCN's 2020 US Elections #Chatbot on WhatsApp. Click here, for more.


  Maarten Schenk

Lead Stories co-founder Maarten Schenk is our resident expert on fake news and hoax websites. He likes to go beyond just debunking trending fake news stories and is endlessly fascinated by the dazzling variety of psychological and technical tricks used by the people and networks who intentionally spread made-up things on the internet.  He can often be found at conferences and events about fake news, disinformation and fact checking when he is not in his office in Belgium monitoring and tracking the latest fake article to go viral.

Read more about or contact Maarten Schenk

Different viewpoints

Note: if reading this fact check makes you want to contact us to complain about bias, please check out our Red feed first.

About Us

International Fact-Checking Organization Meta Third-Party Fact Checker

Lead Stories is a fact checking website that is always looking for the latest false, misleading, deceptive or inaccurate stories, videos or images going viral on the internet.
Spotted something? Let us know!.

Lead Stories is a:


@leadstories

Subscribe to our newsletter

* indicates required

Please select all the ways you would like to hear from Lead Stories LLC:

You can unsubscribe at any time by clicking the link in the footer of our emails. For information about our privacy practices, please visit our website.

We use Mailchimp as our marketing platform. By clicking below to subscribe, you acknowledge that your information will be transferred to Mailchimp for processing. Learn more about Mailchimp's privacy practices here.

Most Read

Most Recent

Share your opinion