We Talked to the Man Behind That Nigerian Pete Buttigieg Fan Account. It’s Not Lis Smith.

Surprise!

Democratic presidential hopeful Pete Buttigieg's spokesperson Lis Smith speaks to the press.JIM WATSON/AFP via Getty Images

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ā€œItā€™s very stressful. Itā€™s almost midnight here and Iā€™ve just been dealing with controversies all day,ā€ said a man claiming to behind the @easychinedu account, a pro-Pete Buttigieg account that went viral on Sunday morning after high-profile Twitter users like David Klion alleged that it was burner belonging to Lis Smith, Buttigieg’s spokesperson.

ā€œThey thought I was a sock puppet,ā€ he said. ā€œI thought it was funny at first, but now I find the whole ordeal very stressful,ā€ he explained saying that his inbox was flooded with messages from journalists and others.

The hoopla mostly stemmed from a single tweet: ā€œTeam Pete. Hey. Itā€™s Lis. Itā€™s Phase 4. Time to leave it all on the floor. Phone bankers we need you,ā€ which was interpreted as a classic account-juggling mistake made by Smith.

After Klion and others directed attention to the account, it tweeted several denials, and then the user deactivated the account. Before it went down, Twitter users grabbed screenshots of the account’s tweets defending Buttigieg and Smith.

Smith denied that the account was hers all day Sunday until BuzzFeed reporter Jane Lytvynenko reported that she had communicated with the man behind the account. Mother Jones also spoke with the person claiming to be behind the account over Facetime. He asked that his identity and personal details not be shared to avoid being doxxed and further harassment, though he also provided a screenshot of his inbox showing an email from Twitter about his account @easychinedu, and Mother Jones was able to verify his identity through public information online. While it’s possible to spoof numbers, the FaceTime call and a separate call on WhatsApp came through a Nigerian international code.

He explained the ā€œHey. Itā€™s Lisā€ tweet as being a ā€œjokeā€ based on campaign emails that mentioned, ā€œPhase 4ā€ in the campaign process where get out the vote operations for Buttigieg start ramping up. ā€œI thought it was funny,ā€ he said.

Twitter sleuths zeroed in on the US style of English and his use of American twitter affectations like ā€œyā€™allā€ and ā€œyikesā€ in his tweets as evidence that the account belonged to Smith. (British English is more common in Nigeria.) The level of scrutiny surprised him. ā€œI thought yā€™all was universal,ā€ he said. He told Mother Jones that he is a millennial; he spent several years time in the US and moved back to Nigeria several years ago. ā€œIā€™m just a regular guy. Just like you. Itā€™s all very strange,ā€ he said.

Itā€™s normal for people abroad to closely follow the American political process given how much American politics affect the rest of the world, and the supposed creator of @EasyChinedu said that was why he cared so much too.

He said that he believes in Buttigieg.

ā€œI know it sounds strange that some people are involved in US politics. A lot of people abroad are supporting Pete,ā€ he said.ā€I donā€™t know how to describe it. I thought it was exciting. Iā€™m a young person, and I saw something in him as another young person.”

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WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We canā€™t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

The upshot: Being able to rally $253,000 in donations over these next few weeks is vitally important simply because it is the number that keeps us right on track, helping make sure we don't end up with a bigger gap than can be filled again, helping us avoid any significant (and knowable) cash-flow crunches for now. We used to be more nonchalant about coming up short this time of year, thinking we can make it by the time June rolls around. Not anymore.

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Getting just 10 percent of the people who care enough about our work to be reading this blurb to part with a few bucks would be utterly transformative for us, and that's very much what we need to keep charging hard in this financially uncertain, high-stakes year.

If you can right now, please support the journalism you get from Mother Jones with a donation at whatever amount works for you. And please do it now, before you move on to whatever you're about to do next and think maybe you'll get to it later, because every gift matters and we really need to see a strong response if we're going to raise the $253,000 we need in less than three weeks.

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