Did Donald Trump Just Tweet an Animated GIF of Himself? Yes He Did, Sort Of...

Fact Check

  • by: Maarten Schenk

Check this:

Screenshot in case the tweet gets taken down:

donalddraws.jpg

The text reads "Nog 10 daugen tot Oilst Carnaval 2017" which is written in a Dutch dialect and means "Ten days to go until Aalst Carnival 2017". The Carnival in Aalst has been recognized by the UNESCO as World Heritage and it is a three-day event during which participants dress up and generally make fun of people in authority. It is quite likely several groups and parade floats will be mocking Donald Trump during this year's edition as is customary with world leaders and politicians during the festival.

However it is doubtful Donald Trump tweeted this himself, it is probably the work of Inti De Ceukelaire again, a Belgian internet security researcher who has been busy looking for old Trump tweets containing links to expired domain names he could then buy and redirect as we reported on earlier. He made another Trump tweet redirect to a My Little Pony fan convention video a while ago too. De Ceukelaire hails from the Aalst region and he was the first to announce the changed tweet via his own Twitter account:

Translation: Donald Trump is counting down too".

De Ceukelaire is well known in internet security circles for his penchant for spectacular stunts. Just last week he released StalkScan which lets you see all publicly available information for a given Facebook profile, even the stuff that is normally hard to find. He also claims to have found a method to discover the phone numbers tied to Facebook accounts.


  Maarten Schenk

Maarten Schenk is the co-founder and COO/CTO of Lead Stories and an expert on fake news and hoax websites. He likes to go beyond just debunking trending fake news stories and is endlessly fascinated by the dazzling variety of psychological and technical tricks used by the people and networks who intentionally spread made-up things on the internet.

Read more about or contact Maarten Schenk

About Us

International Fact-Checking Organization EFCSN Meta Third-Party Fact Checker

Lead Stories is a fact checking website that is always looking for the latest false, misleading, deceptive or inaccurate stories, videos or images going viral on the internet.
Spotted something? Let us know!.

Lead Stories is a:


WhatsApp Tipline

Have a tip or a question? Chat with our friendly robots on WhatsApp!

Add our number +1 (404) 655-4223, follow this link or scan the image below with your phone:

@leadstories

Subscribe to our newsletter

* indicates required

Please select all the ways you would like to hear from Lead Stories LLC:

You can unsubscribe at any time by clicking the link in the footer of our emails. For information about our privacy practices, please visit our website.

We use Mailchimp as our marketing platform. By clicking below to subscribe, you acknowledge that your information will be transferred to Mailchimp for processing. Learn more about Mailchimp's privacy practices here.

Most Read

Most Recent

Share your opinion