Julian Assange sent his first tweet ever from a personal account back in February, and has been tweeting away since. But there’s an impostor account that has been gaining steam recently. How much steam? Donald Trump Jr just retweeted it.
(Photo by Jack Taylor/Getty Images)
A fake Julian Assange Twitter account tweeting about President Obama that was retweeted by Donald Trump Jr on 14 August 2017 (Screenshot via Twitter)
The tweet from the fake Assange account reads, “Trump condemned hours ago. Did Obama denounce BLM or Antifa? Hillary? CNN? Double standard is driving the hate. True equality will fix it.”
And while it does sound like something the Wikileaks founder might say (he’s kind of a dick), it isn’t actually from Julian Assange. That account only has 13,000 followers, not to mention the fact that it spells Julian’s name with two N’s. The real Assange has over 300,000 followers, and spells Julian correctly.
To make things more confusing for people on Twitter, Assange hasn’t been verified. Getting verified doesn’t mean much in the grand scheme of things, but Assange apparently believes it does and has added a blue diamond near his name. His diamond, which is fairly pathetic, is similar to the blue checkmarks that verified Twitter users have. The fake Assange account has an identical blue diamond, which again means nothing.
So, yeah. Assange tweets horrible things and is a huge arsehole. (He has a way of making everything about himself.) But whoever’s running @JuliannAssange isn’t the real Assange. Literal fake news, as it were.