Don’t panic, Nigeria: Trump hasn’t threatened to attack. Two “tweets” from the US President’s Twitter account were fabricated
- This article is more than one year old.
- Published on January 10, 2020 at 09:30
- Updated on January 13, 2020 at 11:01
- 4 min read
- By Segun OLAKOYENIKAN, AFP Nigeria
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One of the images (screenshot below) has been viewed more than 16,000 times since it was shared here on Facebook on January 8, 2020 by an account displaying the logo of Nigeria’s main opposition People's Democratic Party.
It claims to show a tweet from Trump posted at 12:11 am on January 8, 2020.
The caption, replete with uppercase words and spelling errors typical of Trump’s style, reads: “We have reports of NIGERIA supporting Iran ACTIVELY and PASSIVELY….just got of the phone with secretary Pompeo….the USA MUST and WILL respond to terrorist nations IMMEDIATELY!”
A similar version has been shared here, here, and here on Facebook, and on Twitter here, here, here, and here.
Another image purporting to be a Trump tweet also appeared here on Twitter, although the wording is different, but implies the same threat.
They follow recent international developments which saw Iran launch missiles at two air bases hosting American and other foreign troops in Iraq early on January 8, 2020, a move seen as revenge for the killing of its top military commander Qasem Soleimani in a US drone strike near Baghdad Airport on January 3, 2020. Read AFP's report here.
Although some members of the pro-Iran Islamic Movement in Nigeria, known as Shi'ites, protested against the killing of Soleimani on January 6 in the capital Abuja, the Nigerian Supreme Council for Islamic Affairs called for calm.
The two fabricated images appear designed to achieve the opposite by trading on Trump's robust exchanges on Twitter.
AFP searched Trump’s Twitter account on Wayback Machine, a digital archive of internet content that takes regular snapshots of web pages, and found the earliest documented tweet by the US President on January 8 was at 3:15 am (0215 GMT) -- about one hour after one of the purported tweets was supposedly sent.
The so-called tweets do not appear in Trump’s archived timeline. See here and here.
There are also several visual clues that are telling.
For starters, it is customary for tweets appearing in someone’s feed to have three symbols in the footer -- comments, retweets, and likes.
However, when a tweet is opened, those symbols are replaced by “Retweets” and “Likes” and their accompanying numbers (see examples below).
But the image below has an unusual configuration. On one line it shows 244,391 retweets and 319,284 likes, while below that the same metrics are reproduced using the comment, retweet and like symbols, which doesn't happen with Twitter.
The date in the image above is also inconsistent with Twitter's style, which employs the month first, and then the day and year: January 8, 2020.
In the second so-called “tweet”, the number of characters exceeds the limit imposed by Twitter.
AFP did a count -- the image contains 320 characters, 40 more than the limit of 280 set by Twitter, meaning if it was a genuine tweet, it could not have been published.
For good measure, the US Embassy in Nigeria dismissed the images.
Press and information officer, Glenn Guimond, when asked by AFP in an email about the veracity of the purported tweets, said: “This is false.”
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