Ted Cruz Twitter account 'likes' pornographic tweet

Texas senator Ted Cruz has been asked to explain himself after his official account “liked” a pornographic tweet.

Although liking a Twitter post does not necessarily share it, the tweet became available to view on Cruz’s verified profile, leading to series of awkward screenshots.

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Catherine Frazier, Cruz’s senior communications adviser, said “the offensive tweet posted on @tedcruz account earlier has been removed by staff and reported to Twitter”.

But this added to confusion about what had happened, because the like was not a tweet and Frazier’s statement implied that it was made by someone who should not have had access to Cruz’s account.

Cruz joked to reporters on Tuesday that “perhaps we should have done something like this during the Indiana primary”. Cruz finished second to Donald Trump in that state’s presidential primary, ultimately dooming his presidential campaign, which long suffered from the constant media attention enjoyed by Trump.

The Texas senator went on to add “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”. When asked if Cruz himself had liked the tweet, he said said: “It was a staffing issue, and it was inadvertent, it was a mistake, it was not a deliberate action.”

The mishap was particularly awkward due to Cruz’s support of conservative family values and his involvement in a court case in Texas about banning the use of sex toys.

In 2007, when he was Texas’s solicitor general, two sex toy companies sued to overturn the state’s ban on the sale of so-called marital aids. The state defended the ban in submissions partly written by Cruz’s office, which argued:

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.

The US supreme court subsequently found that there was no validity to the state interfering in the sex lives of consenting adults.

The liking of the pornographic post helped resurface a 2016 tweet from the TV producer Craig Mazin, in which he said he shared a room with Cruz and his beliefs about genital stimulation were rather different to those expressed in the state argument.

Twitter users made jokes about the incident based on clips of the pornographic video liked by Cruz’s account.

The timing of the incident, on the anniversary of September 11, also elicited comments.

Cruz has been a frequent subject of mockery on social media and repeatedly named in a conspiracy theory that he is the Zodiac killer, which was also referenced in relation to the Twitter like.