In the age of fake news, it is really important for people to do a little bit more digging before they start pitching us story ideas. Case in point: in the last few days, many in our community sent us a “story” from BigNewsStories.com about a deleted tweet from President-elect Donald Trump that threatened military action against Mexico. According to the post, Trump’s Twitter profile had tweeted out the following (with bad spelling) but within two minutes had deleted the tweet:
Real or not?
The answer is no. Trump never tweeted that out and it was never deleted because it never was tweeted in the first place. How do we know? Here is why we are 100% certain that the “story” is fake:
- Trump’s deleted tweet did not show up on a page that (wait for it) keeps tracks of Trump’s deleted tweets.
- In this world of political journalism, there are plenty of high-profile reporters whose sole job is to be notified immediately when Trump tweets something out. If for two minutes that tweet had been available in Twitter, it would have made global news. That didn’t happen. Did you not all forget that when Trump’s profile actually tweeted out a misspelled word, the media jumped on it like crazy. You don’t think they would have done the same if Trump did indeed type out “boarder?”
- If the tweet were retweeted 504 times, you really don’t think someone wouldn’t have screen grabbed the actual tweet and made news with it? That didn’t happen.
- We are still waiting for all the outrage tweets from Mexico about this.
- The only outlet that published this “story” was BigNewsStories.com, whose mission is this: “Our mission is the bring some huge stories to the internet’s eyes. We will break our backs making sure the best, most entertaining stories are given their time in the light.”
- Do a quick Twitter search of Trump boarder or Trump Mexico military action. You won’t find much, except for the fact that it is a hoax.
But don’t take our word for it. Snopes also categorized the Mexico tweet as “FALSE.” It also added this:
…there are multitudes of sites that allow pranksters to create fake social media posts from celebrities, and this is not the first time that a hoax tweet from Donald Trump has circulated on social media. In December 2016, one fake post appeared to announce that Nickelback was headlining during Trump’s inauguration, and another hoax tweet purported to threaten actor Alec Baldwin for his performance on “Saturday Night Live.“
