Twitter didn’t shut down to help Biden — but Trump tweeted satire article saying that
Twitter was down Thursday night, but it wasn’t for the reasons President Donald Trump tweeted Friday morning.
Trump shared a link to a Babylon Bee article that stated, “Twitter Shuts Down Entire Network to Slow Spread of Negative Biden News.”
But users were quick to point out one problem: The Babylon Bee is a satire website that writes humorous “fake news.”
Along with posting the link to the joking article, Trump wrote, “Wow, this has never been done in history. This includes his really bad interview last night. Why is Twitter doing this?”
Twitter experienced an outage Thursday but was restored for some users around 7 p.m. ET, before Joe Biden and Trump had dueling town hall events at the same time on different networks, CNBC reported.
Twitter said its issue “was caused by an inadvertent change” it made to its internal system. There is no evidence that suggests Twitter was down to benefit Biden’s campaign.
Earlier in the week, Trump retweeted a Babylon Bee story with the satirical headline, “California Mandates All Food Must Be Consumed Through IV To Ensure Masks Are Never Removed.”
The Babylon Bee, a website similar to The Onion, jokes in its Twitter biography it has “fake news you can trust.”
Its website boasts it is “the world’s best satire site, totally inerrant in all its truth claims. We write satire about Christian stuff, political stuff and everyday life.”
Trump’s tweet including The Babylon Bee article is just the latest example of tension between the president and Twitter.
Some of Trump’s tweets have been marked as “manipulated media” by the social media platform, McClatchy News reported. The platform says it labels tweets that “have been deceptively altered or fabricated.”
A tweet Sunday by the president — in which he claimed he was “immune” from COVID-19 — was also marked as “misleading and potentially harmful.” Twitter users are not able to retweet Trump’s post.
Trump on Thursday threatened a “big lawsuit” against Twitter after the platform temporarily locked the Trump campaign’s account for violating “rules against posting private information,” according to Politico.
Trump’s oldest son, Donald Trump Jr., has also had his Twitter account temporarily locked down after he shared misinformation about the coronavirus pandemic, McClatchy News reported.
Twitter also recently shut down The Babylon Bee’s account, claiming it violated its rules against “platform manipulation and spam,” the satirical website said. Its account was eventually restored.
This story was originally published October 16, 2020 at 5:31 AM with the headline "Twitter didn’t shut down to help Biden — but Trump tweeted satire article saying that."