After former Republican House Speaker John Boehner called Republican presidential candidate and Sen. Ted Cruz “Lucifer in the flesh” on Wednesday, the Internet trolls of the 2016 election cycle have returned with Lucifer2016.com, which redirects to Cruz’s campaign website showing off him and his new running mate Carly Fiorina.
Just after Cruz announced Fiorina as his vice presidential running mate on Wednesday, anonymous users also took over the domain carlyfiorinaforvicepresident.com redirecting visitors to a donation page for the Planned Parenthood Action Fund. Fiorina has previously made remarks against Planned Parenthood, calling for the federal defunding of the women’s health provider. Fiorina has also condemned the organization for selling “baby parts” or donated fetal issue — a misleading claim that originated from heavily edited videos released by an anti-abortion group strongly against Planned Parenthood.
But this isn’t the first time Internet trolls have mocked the election candidates, and most of these redirect pranks have occurred, because the candidates’ campaigns did not buy variations of their official domain in time.
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In December, visitors clicking JebBush.com were redirected to Republican front-runner Donald Trump’s official campaign page. Bush, who dropped out of the Republican race in February, only officially owned the domain jeb2016.com. Hillary Clinton has also fallen victim to #DomainGate with HillaryClinton.net redirecting to Trump’s campaign site again. Hillaryforpresident.com also leads to a website owned by an anonymous group called First Amendment Domains that shows a collection of articles criticizing Clinton. Currently, loser.com redirects to Trump’s Wikipedia page. The page began redirecting to Trump starting as early as January, according to the internet archive Wayback Machine. Tedcruz.com also currently redirects to a simple page with a photo of Clinton smiling with the caption “Next President of the United States of America!!!” below. Trolls also took over carlyfiorina.org, after she initially announced her run for the Republican presidential candidacy last may. The domain originally redirected visitors to a page criticizing Fiorina about how many people she allegedly laid off when she was the chief executive of Hewlett-Packard. The domain doesn’t appear to be owned by anyone now.
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