Donald Trump’s Twitter feed is a nightmare of lies and fake news. Most of the falsehoods and conspiracy theories and violence come from the president himself, but the social media-addicted man is never one to shy away from a horrifying retweet as well. One of his preferred sources was a meme creator known online as Carpe Donktum, real name Logan Cook. Today, after Trump shared a doctored video from Cook’s account, the user has finally been banned completely from Twitter.
The most recent offending video by Cook showed doctored footage of a CNN story from 2019 about two toddlers, one black and one white. The altered version had ominous music and a fake CNN caption that read: “Terrified todler runs from racist baby.” And yes, “toddler” was misspelled in Cook’s version. Before the “clip,” the video showed the caption: “America is not the problem. Fake news is the problem.”
To Cook’s credit, he’s not wrong … but he’s the one making literal fake news and getting a platform boost from the leader of the free world.
The video was retweeted by Trump and Twitter slapped it with a “manipulated media” warning, which was a good step. Cook however had been suspended from Twitter before, and also the subject of controversy for other manipulated videos and memes, many of which Trump had retweeted. He was suspended last year for a video made to show Trump assaulting CNN reporter Jim Acosta.
Cook was not banned from Twitter for making terrible, evil memes though. Nope! He was suspended for repeated copyright violations. Cook claims that he did not violate Twitter’s policies and that he’s being censored to which we can only say … fine? It doesn’t really matter if this suspension is the social media equivalent of getting Al Capone on tax evasion, but we suspect the copyright violations are legit. Social media companies tend to take DMCA takedown requests extremely seriously, and the onus is on the person alleged to have infringed to prove that they did not.
We’ll see if Trump responds to this. Cook sounds like the kind of guy Trump would call a very fine person, and since Trump himself is increasingly being called out and having his lies and incitements to violence labeled by Twitter, he may see this as a further strike against him personally. We can only hope that this is indeed another escalation that will one day lead to Trump being removed from the bird app permanently.
(image: Alex Wong/Getty Images)
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