Supporters of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez have flooded the #AOCLied hashtag with images of cats and dogs after the Congresswoman called on fans to report social media critics to Twitter and Facebook.
Ms Ocasio-Cortez has been in a war of words with Twitter users suggesting she exaggerated the degree of the danger she was in during the riots at the US Capitol.
Trending hashtags from the meme trolling included #AOClied and #AlexandriaOcasioSmollet, about the hate crime hoax of actor Jussie Smollett in 2019.
In response, fans bombarded the hashtags with an endless ream of pets.
The reclamation of hashtags came as Ms Ocasio-Cortez spent the week defending her recollection of events during the riot at the US Capitol building, which accelerated after she challenged the assertions of One America News Network's Jack Posobiec.
After GOP congresswoman Nancy Mace said that her office is two doors down from AOC’s and that “insurrectionists never stormed our hallway,” Mr Posobiec has been a leading figure in the campaign to discredit the New York politician's account.
"This isn’t a fact check at all. Your arrows aren’t accurate. They lie about where the mob stormed & place them further away than it was," Ms Ocasio-Cortez said to Mr Posobiec.
"You also fail to the convey *multiple* areas people were trying to storm. It wasn’t 1. You also failed to show tunnels. Poor job all around."
Mr Posobiec continued the back and forth, sharing an email from her office purportedly calling for help to "combat this campaign of disinformation" by calling out Photoshopped tweets, fake news and misleading posts.
"Scan your social media to find posts with this misleading information, especially those using the trending hashtag," the email reproduction posted across Twitter reads, without explicitly calling out the specific hashtags.
"Identify any posts that are threatening or harassing and use the built-in report features to flag them for moderators. Facebook and Twitter both have built in tools for reporting posts and tweets that break the rules."
A spokeswoman for Ms Ocasio-Cortez did not immediately respond to The Independent's request for comment. Twitter has also been approached for comment on whether they have taken any action on the hashtags.
