Conspiracy theorists think Joe Biden is actually just a guy in a mask, pretending to be the 80-year-old president. Under normal circumstances, that would be a baseless, fringe opinion that is consigned to the dustbin of public discourse. But now, Elon Musk’s social media platform X/Twitter is pushing it to the top of everyone’s newsfeeds. Tweets have flooded the platform in recent days claiming that Biden has a body double, following pictures of the president returning from his recent trip to Israel. “They’ve been pretty good up until now making sure he never spends too long in a hot room so the mask will start coming off of his chin,” said right-wing conspiracy theorist Brian Cates last week. “Here the mask is starting to come loose, it is visible and you can see the bulging in the chin area.” Cates was one of a flood of accounts which tweeted the video with a suggestion that Biden’s face was, in fact, fake, and got tens of thousands of likes and retweets for it. Separately, another user called Liz Churchill posted a video, which appears to be a zoomed-in shot of a television screen, saying: “This is getting more ridiculous by the day. This is not Joe Biden.” The discourse comes on the same day that the Kremlin denied a report that Russian president Vladimir Putin was ill. It also laughed off speculation that he used body doubles to cover for him in public appearances, a theory that has been circulating for several years. "Everything is fine with him, this is absolutely another fake," Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said. He was responding to a question about an unsourced report by a Russian Telegram channel that the president had suffered a serious health episode on Sunday evening. As for Biden, there is zero credible evidence to suggest that he is anything other than an old man with a wrinkly face. However, in the increasingly warped world of X/Twitter, conspiracy theorists now have all the blue “verified” ticks rather than trusted news sources. And it seems with Musk’s changes, such as pushing those blue tickers’ tweets into the new “for you” section of the feed, more and more people are going to be seeing theories like this, much more frequently. How to join the indy100's free WhatsApp channel Sign up to our free Indy100 weekly newsletter Have your say in our news democracy. Click the upvote icon at the top of the page to help raise this article through the indy100 rankings.