Texas Senator Ted Cruz tweeted a photo of what looked like a shark swimming through a flooded freeway in Los Angeles during Tropical Storm Hilary. The photo is a well-known internet hoax and was even flagged by X, formerly known as Twitter.

“The photo originally appeared in 2011, after Hurricane Irene hit Puerto Rico. The hoax also made the rounds in 2015 after Texas was hit with heavy rains, in 2016 during Hurricane Matthew and again in 2017 after Hurricane Harvey,” X added as a community note to confirm that the image was indeed fake.

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The original post was captioned, “Friend of mine out in LA just took this picture on the 405. And yes, all news and media outlets you have permission to use this. Wild.” It was posted by Barstool’s Dan Katz. When the Republican lawmaker tweeted the photo, he captioned it simply, “Holy crap.”

At some point Cruz did realize that the photo was not real. “I’m told this is a joke. In LA, you never know… And everyone please stay safe from the storm or otherwise,” he tweeted in response to his retweet. However, the post is still up on Cruz’s personal account.

According to TMZ, Cruz should have been familiar with the hoax shark photo as it also went viral during hurricanes in his own home state.

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The image was originally circulated as showing a street in Puerto Rico just after Hurricane Irene hit that island in August 2011. The image of the shark was lifted from a 2005 photograph of a kayaker being trailed by a great white shark and pasted into a photograph of a flooded street.

The photograph originally showed a vast expanse of blue sea with a yellow kayak in the middle of it and the kayaker looking back at a huge shark under water, swimming toward it. “Sitting in a 3.8-metre sea kayak and watching a four-metre great white approach you is a fairly tense experience,” the photograph’s lower-right corner said.