President Donald Trump raised eyebrows among Twitter users on Friday morning after sharing a satirical article claiming Twitter had shut down its entire network to slow the spread of negative news about his political rival Joe Biden.
"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 in a post that quickly attracted more than 16,000 likes on the platform.
The article was published yesterday by The Babylon Bee, a news satire website, whose own Twitter bio reads "Fake news you can trust." Twitter suffered a global outage on Thursday that left millions of users unable to post or retweet content for more than an hour, later blamed on an "inadvertent change" to its internal systems.
The unexpected downtime came as Republicans pushed for the U.S. social media giant and its billionaire CEO Jack Dorsey to be sanctioned after blocking the circulation of a controversial New York Post story about Joe Biden's son earlier this week.
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 Bee article read: "In a last-ditch effort to stop negative stories about Joe Biden and his family from spreading, Twitter shut down its entire social network Thursday.
"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!" it continued.
It was not immediately clear if the president was in on the joke. Newsweek has contacted the White House for comment. Twitter declined to comment on the post.
Seth Dillon, chief executive officer of the popular Florida-based satirical news website, tweeted today: "The Babylon Bee is the president's most trusted news source."
Roughly two hours after his first post, Trump clarified in a second tweet that "Big T" was a reference to big tech, which is a term often used to describe social media giants and large U.S. technology companies such as Facebook, Twitter, Apple and Google.
The president tweeted: "Big T was not a reference to me, but rather to Big Tech, which should have been properly pointed out in Twitter's Fake Trending Section!"
This article was updated following a second tweet sent by president Trump.
Uncommon Knowledge
Newsweek is committed to challenging conventional wisdom and finding connections in the search for common ground.
Newsweek is committed to challenging conventional wisdom and finding connections in the search for common ground.
About the writer
Jason Murdock is a staff reporter for Newsweek.
Based in London, Murdock previously covered cybersecurity for the International Business Times UK ... Read more
