Politics

FACT CHECK: Did Barack Obama Send This Tweet Seemingly Poking Fun At Donald Trump’s Twitter Suspension?

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An image shared on Facebook purportedly shows a tweet from former President Barack Obama in which he seemingly pokes fun at President Donald Trump’s suspension from the platform.

Facebook/Screenshot

Verdict: False

There is no record of Obama tweeting the statement. The tweet appears to be fabricated.

Fact Check:

Twitter announced in a Jan. 8 statement that it had permanently suspended President Donald Trump’s account “due to the risk of further incitement of violence.” The company had previously temporarily suspended his account for 12 hours over several tweets about his supporters storming the U.S. Capitol, according to CBS News.

Following Trump’s permanent suspension, Facebook users began sharing an image that appears to show a screen grab of a Jan. 9 tweet from Obama, seemingly poking fun at Trump’s suspension from the platform.

“Man do I love having this Twitter account, the ability to connect to so many millions of people, to express my feelings and views, to know that all major media outlets and world leaders are reading these words, that they are recorded for posterity,” reads the alleged tweet. “How awesome is that?”

The tweet, however, appears to have been fabricated. A search of the former president’s verified Twitter account, @BarackObama, turned up no matching tweet. Archived screen grabs of Obama’s Twitter profile on Jan. 9, the day the alleged tweet was sent, likewise do not show the tweet. Media outlets also didn’t report on Obama tweeting such a thing.

While Obama doesn’t appear to have publicly commented on Trump’s Twitter suspension, his wife, Michelle Obama, did encourage Twitter and other social media companies to remove Trump from their platforms the day before Twitter did so.

pic.twitter.com/2xhMyVMpDF

— Michelle Obama (@MichelleObama) January 7, 2021

“Now is the time for Silicon Valley companies to stop enabling this monstrous behavior and go even further than they have already by permanently banning this man from their platforms,” she wrote in a Jan. 7 statement she posted on her Twitter account.