Tuesday 6 February 2018

Fake Donald Trump stock market tweet goes viral after British man's joke backfires

Donald Trump is famously no fan of fake news, so you can probably guess how he feels about a fake tweet attributed to him going viral.
Shaun Usher, who runs the ‘Letters of Note’ blog, posted a spoof Trump tweet, that said: ‘If the Dow Joans ever falls more than 100 “points” in a Single Day the sitting president should be “loaded” into a very big cannon and Shot into the sun at TREMENDOUS SPEED! No excuses!’
He posted the fake tweet as a joke, poking fun at the President’s often controversial Twitter feed and how Trump’s past tweets often come back to haunt him.
He was referencing the fact that the Dow Jones plunged more than 1100 points on Monday.
Usher captioned it: “There’s *always* a tweet.”
Much to his horror, the post quickly notched up thousands of likes and retweets. 
Usher said he was soon contacted by worldwide media outlets about his joke tweet.
He wrote: “Sweet mother of god. Not for one second did I think people would believe that to be genuine.”
HIs notifications soon went wild:
He later posted why he didn’t take the fake tweet down, saying it would be “dangerous”:
Usher told Snopes: ‘Naively thought it was too ridiculous to be believable. Says a lot, really. Was going to delete it but it was everywhere within minutes: feels like I need to leave it up in its place of birth.’
The Dow Jones points plunge saw US stocks taking their worst loss in six-and-a-half years.

Two days of steep losses erased the market’s gains from the start of this year and ended a period of record-setting calm for stocks.

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