Late yesterday, Twitter was down temporarily, which happens from time to time. The brief outage led Babylon Bee, a self-described satirical website, to publish this item under the headline, “Twitter Shuts Down Entire Network To Slow Spread Of Negative Biden News.”
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.
The fictional story went on to describe a made-up scenario in which the Twitter CEO “started smashing as many computers as he could,” before programmers, too weak to lift hammers, began programing a robot to destroy servers for them.
Eventually, the satirical story concluded, “the robot got woke and began attacking all the cis white males.”
Putting aside whether this obvious attempt at humor was actually funny — Babylon Bee is basically a conservative version of The Onion — the fact remains that no rational person could’ve seen yesterday’s report and thought that the story was real. And yet…
President Donald Trump on Friday shared a fake report from a known news satire website in a seeming effort to bash Twitter for its efforts to block a proliferation of misinformation on its platform about Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden…. Trump appeared to hope that his followers might take the satirical story with some seriousness when he tweeted: “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.” We’re left with a couple of possibilities. Perhaps Trump is so lacking in critical thinking skills that he saw the satirical piece and assumed it was real. It’s more likely, however, that the president saw the headline, couldn’t be bothered to read the brief, 155-word joke, and quickly concluded that the “story” was worth sharing with his 87 million Twitter followers. Either way, this has been a difficult week for Trump and his embrace of ridiculous conspiracy theories, and this only made matters more pitiful.
Steve Benen is a producer for "The Rachel Maddow Show," the editor of MaddowBlog and an MS NOW political contributor. He's also the bestselling author of "Ministry of Truth: Democracy, Reality, and the Republicans' War on the Recent Past."
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