In eight months, Erica Marsh has become one of the most consistently viral left-wing voices on Twitter, gaining more than 130,000 followers for her hyper-liberal, often melodramatic opinions on the biggest flash points in American news.

Tech is not your friend. We are. Sign up for The Tech Friend newsletter.

She's been especially popular with conservatives, who promoted her as a perfect symbol of how overly theatrical and inane progressives can be -- like when she attacked the Supreme Court's affirmative-action decision last week by saying "no Black person will be able to succeed in a merit-based system." The tweet was viewed more than 27 million times.

There's just one problem: She's probably a fake.

The "proud Democrat" in Washington, as she described herself on Twitter, doesn't show up in any local phone or voting records. The Biden presidential campaign, where she said she worked as a field organizer, has no record of her; neither does the Obama Foundation, where she claimed to have volunteered.

Her only other known social media profile, on TikTok, posts copies of her tweets but has never included her speaking or showing her face. And a digital-imaging expert said that the three purported selfies she's posted on Twitter -- showing a young, smiling blond woman -- bear the hallmarks of digital manipulation.

"I strongly suspect that this person doesn't exist," said John Scott-Railton, a senior researcher at the Citizen Lab at the University of Toronto who studies online disinformation.