Edward 'BigBalls' Coristine did not reveal election fraud

Analysing a false claim

Published on the web at https://internettalk.xyz/blog/edward-coristine-election-fraud.

Edward "BigBalls" Coristine is one of the young engineers recruited to run DOGE, Elon Musk's "Government Efficiency" task force. His name was first revealed in a Jan 30th article by WIRED.

He is not a particularly nice person: further reporting revealed he was fired from a tech startup that is comprised of convicted criminals. Brian Krebs' reporting was worse, revealing that he was part of a group that, at best is a cybercriminal ring, at worst, is a terror sextortion network that aims to get children to commit suicide on livestream.

Whatever Coristine is, here is one thing he didn't do: admit on Twitter that he committed election fraud to get Elon Musk elected.

The claim

Spreading on Bluesky (another post), Hacker News, and probably Twitter, the claim is that Coristine tweeted the following:

It is unclear the primary source for this screenshot, but this reddit post is a potential match.

This tweet is probably real. But the user isn't Coristine. Coristine's Twitter handle was renamed and made private on February 2nd. The tweet was made on February 7th.

See the problem?

After Coristine renamed his account, anyone could have taken the handle, and clearly, someone did.

To further substantiate the claim: Coristine's account was made on November 2021. The current holder of @edwardbigballer made the account on June 2023.

(source)

Doing some Google sleuthing, we can find what is likely the original username. Searching for the content of his first remaining tweet,

We find this search result,

Not only does the tweet content and post date match, but this person also uses the "(blue check)" suffix that the Big Baller tweet has.

We can further validate this claim. This tweet chain is indexed by Google as being between @whoistomlove, and @JeRrE1776, but the current active version lists it as being between @edwardbigballer, and @JeRrE1776.

Tom Love isn't really relevant enough to be archived any further, but we've proven quite definitively that the handle was simply hijacked.

So, there it is. Coristine did not reveal a plot to reveal election fraud, and this continues to be a lesson why not to trust random screenshots without doing your due diligence.