The Undergraduate Student Government Vice Presidential candidate Shayanna Hinkle-Moore faced backlash Monday after a misunderstanding regarding the return of an ID. Credit: Jessica Langer | Campus LTV Producer
Keep your friends close and your IDs closer.
Undergraduate Student Government vice presidential candidate Shayanna Hinkle-Moore faced backlash on social media Monday after another student, Mahika Mushuni, reshared past emails between the two. In the September 2021 exchange, Hinkle-Moore said she found Mushuni’s ID, which she thought was a fake ID, and would return it for $30.
Mushuni, a fourth-year in economics, said she jokingly reintroduced the exchange Sunday, which was originally posted in a tweet Dec. 31, 2021, after hearing from a friend that Hinkle-Moore was the vice presidential candidate.
“I didn’t really think it would get big at Ohio State because I don’t follow a lot of people from Ohio State on Twitter,” Mushuni said.
Mushuni said she lost her ID after it fell out of her phone wallet. She said she retrieved it from Hinkle-Moore about a week after the initial email exchange, and she didn’t pay any money to get it back.
Hinkle-Moore, a third-year in city and regional planning, shared a statement with The Lantern through her co-runner USG presidential candidate Andrew Pierce saying she regrets assuming the ID was fake and was joking when she told Mushuni she needed to pay for its return.
“This has been a complete misunderstanding, and I know my initial tweets confused the situation. Please accept my apologies,” Hinkle-Moore said.
Those initial tweets have since been deleted after Hinkle-Moore received backlash from users, Pierce, a third-year in public policy and analysis, said.
Mushuni said she and Hinkle-Moore spoke publicly through Twitter replies to relay the events of the incident to other users. The tweets from Hinkle-Moore are now hidden because she made her Twitter account private.
Mushuni said the initial Dec. 31 tweet only circulated within her inner circle of friends on Twitter, and she expected the same for this tweet. She said Hinkle-Moore’s explanatory responses to her tweet are what caused it to receive a lot of attention.
Mushuni’s Sunday tweet, which had 457 likes and 28 retweets at the time of publication, was also shared on the Barstool Ohio State Instagram account, which garnered over 7,600 likes and 104 comments at the time of publication.
Following the online controversy, Ohio State students Michael Farquharson and Henry Levenberg created a satirical campaign to show that they don’t agree with the perceived actions of Hinkle-Moore, Farquharson, a second-year in mechanical engineering, said.
Farquharson and Levenberg, a fourth-year in technical education and training, posted on Reddit Monday announcing the pair’s write-in campaign, hoping to get more than the average number of write-in votes, Farquharson said.
Mushuni said she does not plan to address the incident any further on social media.
“I’m not really trying to engage with it a ton, but I would be open to a conversation with her,” Mushuni said. “I don’t want her to feel like it was a personal attack, of course. I would hope that people are not personally attacking her online because I think that would be very uncalled for.”
