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.
The story tweeted by the President early Friday morning was published by The Babylon Bee — a self-described satire site — and stated that Twitter had “shut down its entire social network” Thursday to curb the spread of negative press about 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.”
The President’s tweet follows an effort by Twitter and other social media platforms to block users from sharing an unfounded article that appeared in the New York Post about Biden and his son Hunter that has been fueled by Russian disinformation.
The remarks come hours after President refused to disavow a far-right conspiracy group during an NBC town hall event on Thursday and broadly defended his sharing of misinformation on Twitter and other social media platforms.
Trump was pressed on the issue Thursday by “Today” show anchor Savannah Guthrie who asked about his recent efforts to share false theories about his Democratic opponent.
“Just this week, you retweeted to your 87 million followers a conspiracy theory that Joe Biden orchestrated to have SEAL Team 6 kill to cover up the fake death of Osama Bin Laden. Now why would you send a lie like that to your followers?” Guthrie asked.
“That was a retweet,” Trump said. “That was an opinion of somebody and that was a retweet. People can decide for themselves.”
“I don’t get that, you’re the president, you’re not someone’s crazy uncle who can just retweet whatever,” Guthrie said.
Trump insisted that somehow by retweeting a post he was not culpable for the impact of its contents on his millions of followers.
