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

Lead Stories co-founder Maarten Schenk is our resident 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.  He can often be found at conferences and events about fake news, disinformation and fact checking when he is not in his office in Belgium monitoring and tracking the latest fake article to go viral.

Read more about or contact Maarten Schenk

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