President Trump shared an article from a conservative satirical website Friday morning, seemingly unaware it was not real news.
The morning after both he and his 2020 election opponent Joe Biden took part in dueling town halls on rival networks, Trump linked to the article, which claimed that Twitter had shut down their entire site to stop the spread of negative Biden stories.
“Wow, this has never been done in history. This includes his really bad interview last night. Why is Twitter doing this. Bringing more attention to Sleepy Joe & Big T,” Trump wrote.
The satirical article came after Twitter actually did suffer an outage on Thursday, claiming that the site malfunctioned due to “a system change initiated earlier than planned” that prevented users from tweeting. However, just hours earlier, the site censored a New York Post story about Biden’s son Hunter which prompted a backlash against the tech giant.
The Washington Examiner reached out to the White House for comment.
Twitter Shuts Down Entire Network To Slow Spread Of Negative Biden News https://t.co/JPmjOrKPcr via @TheBabylonBee Wow, this has never been done in history. This includes his really bad interview last night. Why is Twitter doing this. Bringing more attention to Sleepy Joe & Big T
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) October 16, 2020
The satirical article joked: “After seeing account after account tweet out one particularly bad story, CEO Jack Dorsey realized he had to take action. Dorsey smashed a glass box in his office reading ‘Break In Case Of Bad Publicity For Democrats.’ Inside the case was a sledgehammer for smashing Twitter’s servers. ‘Red alert — shut the servers down! Shut them all down!'”
It then said: “Dorsey ran downstairs and started smashing as many computers as he could, but he did need to ask for some help, as the hammer was pretty heavy.” The story ends with a robot becoming “woke” after hearing Twitter employees discuss critical race theory and “attacking all the cis white males.”
After the president shared the satirical article, Babylon Bee CEO Seth Dillon quipped, “The Babylon Bee is the president’s most trusted news source.”
The Babylon Bee is the president’s most trusted news source. https://t.co/dSu545fWXL
— Seth Dillon (@SethDillon) October 16, 2020
The story Twitter censored from the New York Post purported to show evidence Hunter Biden facilitated communications between his father and Vadym Pozharskyi, who served as an adviser to the board of Ukrainian energy firm Burisma that the younger Biden was once on. The Biden campaign denied that an official meeting between the two occurred.
Twitter locked the outlet out of its account and prevented users from sharing the article in tweets and direct messaging. As of Friday morning, the New York Post remains unable to access its account.
