Did the Trump campaign really delete old controversial tweets during the debate?

The first 2016 US presidential debate is now the 'most tweeted' political event. Unsurprisingly, Republican candidate Donald Trump and his tweets, both old and current, featured on many users' timelines. Twitter was briefy in an uproar over an erroneous rumour that Trump's campaign was deleting old, controversial tweets during the debate.

In particular, one of Trump's tweets from 2012 on global warming was alleged to have been deleted. The tweet displayed Trump blaming China for having "created" global warming to "make US manufacturing non-competitive".

An image of the tweet saying it was "no longer available" was reportedly posted by Twitter user Juan Vidal. The rumour quickly spread across Twitter like wildfire, with numerous users retweeting and commenting on the alleged deletion.

However, the tweet is still up on Trump's account. Some users then began pointing out that Trump's tweet did in fact still exist and could be viewed on his account. One Twitter user theorised that the account of the Twitter user who first alleged that the tweet in question was deleted, may have been blocked by Trump, leading to the tweet being specifically unavailable to view.

However, it is still unclear as to whether the original image uploaded, touting the deletion of the tweet, was doctored. This particular tweet, which was retweeted around 35,000 times in a fairly short period, has since been deleted by the user, CNet reported. Trump's global warming tweet on the other hand now has over 80,000 retweets.