The tweet on the right caught my attention this morning. It contains a screenshot of Gérard Araud, French ambassador to the US replying to a tweet written by Donald Trump. Trump calls the “tragedy in Paris” “interesting” given that France has some of the strictest gun control laws in the world and Araud calls Trump “repugnant” and lacking “human decency”.
My immediate reaction was skepticism: even Trump, now running for president, wouldn’t write such an insensitive tweet following November 13th’s tragic attacks. So, after getting over the shock value of what I read, I went into fact checking mode. It didn’t take very much research to poke holes in this claim. The screenshot posted in the tweet shows the tweet by Trump was sent on January 7th; obviously not after the attacks. I also checked Donald Trump’s twitter account, and quickly observed that the tweet was not in his timeline, and he had in fact tweeted prayers for Paris.
However, the tweet by Trump is real and a quick google search found it (at the time of writing this, it has not been deleted):
https://twitter.com/realdonaldtrump/status/552955167533174785
Rather than being about the attacks on November 13th, the tweet was written in response to the Charlie Hebdo attacks, which happened January 7th, 2015. (The tweet by Araud seems to be legitimate and has been mentioned by various sources, but has been deleted)
So how did so many people miss this fact?
We have found, from observing how false claims spread on Twitter, that when emotions are running high people are much less likely to fact check before retweeting or spreading information. Trump’s polarizing influence likely contributed as well. Combined, it’s not too surprising that almost nine thousand people retweeted @langstonwalker’s tweet.
However, even though @langstonwalker’s tweet has so many retweets, Twitter kept it’s head overall and though the spread of this claim is not insignificant, there is fairly high skepticism searching for keywords like “trump paris” and “trump ambassador”, observed by TwitterTrails.
See the data we collected on the claim here: http://twittertrails.wellesley.edu/~trails/stories/investigate.php?id=903740897
Something else I noticed was that in the initial screenshot of Trump’s tweet, it has 2.4k retweets. That number has since doubled. Even if Trump didn’t write the message about the Paris attacks, it still resonated with people afterwards (our research shows that retweets usually indicate agreement). See the recent retweets here: http://twittertrails.wellesley.edu/~trails/stories/investigate.php?id=408741727
Although a few thousand users retweeted this message after the attacks, even more people linked to it in tweets, to express something other than agreement. We collected over 26,000 tweets linking to Trump’s post since the attacks, expressing outrage and expletives in many languages: http://twittertrails.wellesley.edu/~trails/stories/investigate.php?id=558749281
