I call it "semantic gaslighting" and it started around the time that Al Gore said that he took the initiative in creating the Internet. Those were his exact words.

In order to fact-check this as "false" the claim focuses directly on the more colloquial version "Al Gore claims he created the Internet." Since those weren't literally his exact words, the left simply dismisses it by saying "Al Gore never said that."

This was one of the earliest "fact checks" on Snopes when they started transitioning from an interesting site about urban legends to a left wing propaganda machine. They say that the sentence “During my service in the United States Congress, I took the initiative in creating the Internet", according to Snopes, " cannot reasonably be interpreted" as a personal boast of creating the Internet - and therefore the fact check reads false.