The same day that Facebook removed a set of Trump campaign ads for violating the company’s rules against hate symbols, the president continued to push the envelope with his social media presence. On Thursday night, Trump shared a crudely edited video of two children with a fake CNN chyron reading “Terrified todler [sic] runs from racist baby.” Ironically, the video goes on to declare “America is not the problem, fake news is.”
The video, which had 7.9 million views at the time of writing, quickly earned Twitter’s “manipulated media” warning label, indicating just under the tweet itself that the content is not what it seems. Clicking through the warning label leads to a page fact-checking the tweet, including links to the original CNN share of the video of the two kids with the framing “These two toddlers are showing us what real-life besties look like.”
The altered video tags @carpedonktum in the lower right-hand corner, signaling that it was made by the infamous meme-making Trump fan whom uses that pseudonym. Carpe Donktum, a.k.a. Logan Cook, attended the White House’s social media summit, a largely anecdotal exercise in airing unsubstantiated complaints of social media’s anti-conservative bias last year.
Trump has shared viral pro-Trump videos originating with Cook before, including a clip showing Joe Biden sneaking up behind himself and giving his own shoulders a squeeze. Cook, who runs a site called Meme World, was suspended from Twitter for a short period of time last year in the fallout from a video by a Meme World contributor depicting Trump murdering his critics in the media.
