The internet fell for an outlandish joke on Twitter that claimed White House staffers created a TV channel consisting of nothing but gorillas fighting for President Donald Trump’s amusement.
Just before the release of ‘Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House,’ a tell-all book about Trump’s first year in office, @pixelatedboat, a parody Twitter account posted a fake excerpt from the book that fooled a lot of people.
The Thursday post claims that during his first night in the White House, Trump complained his television was broken because it didn’t have “the gorilla channel.”
“Trump seemed to be under the impression that a TV channel existed that screened nothing but gorilla-based content, 24 hours a day,” the parody account tweeted.
In order to appease the president, the post said White House staffers edited footage from several documentaries to create a “makeshift” gorilla channel. The staffers were then able to broadcast the channel into Trump’s bedroom TV from “a hastily-constructed transmission tower on the South Lawn.”
However, Trump was “bored” with their efforts, complaining the gorillas were not fighting enough. So, the staff added more footage of gorillas fighting each other until the president was “satisfied.”
The post quotes a fake “insider” who said Trump spends 17 hours a day, four inches from the screen. “The way you hit that other gorilla was good,” Trump tells the gorillas on screen.
“I think he thinks the gorillas can hear him,” the fake source added.
The post was retweeted more than 17,000 times by Friday and many users seemed to actually believe the story.
Many cited the fake excerpt as a reason not to take Wolff’s new book seriously.
Eric Garland, who bills himself as a “strategic intelligence analyst” and who once posited a “game theory” connecting Hurricane Katrina to alleged Russian hacking, re-tweeted the fake story to his 171,000 followers as if it were real.
When he later learned the story was fake, Garland thanked those who called him out for spreading fake news.
While some were fooled, most tweeters immediately understood the story was a joke.
In order to clear up any confusion that his tweet was a parody, the original poster even changed the display name of his Twitter page to “the gorilla channel thing is a joke.” However, he did not think it would actually help.