Sen. J.D. Vance (R-Ohio) was accused over the weekend of searching for lewd content on X involving women and dolphins.
Vance jokingly proclaimed in a post on Saturday that the internet might have been a mistake after sharing a screenshot of a video on X that purportedly showed a woman getting "violated by a dolphin."
But users on the platform were quick to notice something peculiar. The words "Woman" and "dolphin" were in bold, which suggests that Vance could have found the video after searching for those exact words.
The notion that Vance might have been using X to look for videos of women and dolphins was noticed almost immediately by users.
"Uh the bold words means he searched for this," X user Shoshana Weissmann wrote.
Others accused the senator of wasting the public's time by searching for what they described as "dolphin porn."
"C'mon, man. You're a Republican Senator," user Robert Skvarla said. "Shouldn't you be working on some kind of bill that grinds children into dust instead of looking up dolphin porn?"
Some users came to Vance's defense and instead argued that he had likely been aware of the video prior to his post.
"As much as I hate the guy he probably saw the tweet, thought it was outrageous, then typed this later to find it back and tweet about how outrageous it is," the user Slazac noted.
While it is also possible that the screenshot had been taken by someone else and merely reposted by Vance, a search for the exact image by the Daily Dot did not reveal any other results.
Vance's post has since been seen more than 2.2 million times, which is a significantly higher view count than those on his other recent posts.
The senator has seemingly declined to respond to the thousands of comments questioning whether he had been searching for lewd dolphin videos.
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