After billionaire Elon Musk anounced that "likes" on X, formerly Twitter, will now be private, users were quick to troll Texas Republican Senator Ted Cruz over a 2017 incident in which his account "liked" a hardcore adult video.
Twitter's engineering team said via its official account that users "will still be able to see posts you have liked (but others cannot)," that "Like count and other metrics for your own posts will still show up under notifications," that users "will no longer see who liked someone else’s post," and that "A post’s author can see who liked its posts."
Although liking a post does not necessarily share it, the now-infamous tweet appeared on Cruz’s verified profile, resulting in a series of telling screenshots.
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At the time, Catherine Frazier, Cruz’s senior communications adviser, stated “the offensive tweet posted on @tedcruz account earlier has been removed by staff and reported to Twitter." This statement added to the confusion, as the "like" was not a tweet and suggested that someone unauthorized had accessed Cruz's account.
Cruz later told the press “there are a number of people on the team that have access to the account and it appears that someone inadvertently hit the like button." He said the matter "was a staffing issue, and it was inadvertent, it was a mistake, it was not a deliberate action.”
The latest change prompted X users to remind others of Cruz's gaffe—and the reactions were hilarious.
This isn't the first time Cruz has made the news for titillating reasons.
Thanks to Cruz, there are more restrictive laws on owning sex toys in Texas than there are on guns.
According to Section 43.23 of the Texas penal code, people are forbidden from having more than six "obscene devices" in their possession. In fact, the law states that anyone who possesses them "or similar obscene articles is presumed to possess them with intent to promote the same.”
In 2007, Cruz, then the state's Solicitor General, took part in a federal case to maintain the state's ban on the sale of sex toys. The brief in that case asserted that there is "no substantive-due-process right to stimulate one’s genitals for non-medical purposes unrelated to procreation or outside of an interpersonal relationship.”
While that statute was overturned in 2008, regulations surrounding sex toys remain on the books–even if they're not exactly enforced.
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