Scientists Start Fake Twitters To Clap Back At Trump's Climate Change Rejection
Let me tell you the tale of rogue scientists using Twitter under Donald Trump. He started his presidency on the attack against science and the environment.
He deleted all mentions of climate change — scientifically-backed destruction of the environment due to human activity, which Trump has questioned — from the White House website and announced plans to stop the work President Barack Obama started to combat it.
This has made many scientists and people who care about the environment quite nervous. They've begun saving environmental data that has been stored on government accounts in case Trump deletes it.
Members of the National Parks Service have not been happy about Trump's apparent disregard for the environment.
On the day of his inauguration, the main National Parks Service Twitter account "accidentally" retweeted some tweets showing the difference in crowd size between the inaugurations of Trump and Obama.
Trump did not like that. The Washington NPS support office told all parks services to "immediately cease use of government Twitter accounts until further notice."
The accounts were apparently allowed to start tweeting again after the main account apologized for the retweets over the weekend.
That's when the regional parks started going rogue on Twitter.
It began with Badlands National Park in South Dakota.
On January 24, they began tweeting out facts about climate change — nothing crazy or directly anti-Trump, just straight facts.
Twitter started celebrating the account "going rogue" and defying Trump's claimed disbelief of climate change, throwing some serious shade.
Soon enough, the tweets were deleted.
But that was far from the end of scientists and national parks throwing shade at Trump.
After the Badlands tweets were deleted, several new Twitter accounts popped up, claiming to be members of the National Parks Service in resistance.
This included @NatParkUndrgrnd and @AltNatParkSer.
The Alt account claims to be the Parks Service acting in their free time, although the accounts have not been verified. The accounts are tweeting about climate change and asking for followers to support the National Parks Service.
Scientists also started planning their own march on Washington.
They are organizing on social media, including the Twitter account @ScienceMarchDC.
Meanwhile, official accounts are still throwing shade (in the form of facts) at Trump.
On January 25, the same day Trump had plans for orders on limiting refugees and blocking immigration, the US Department of Defense tweeted the story of a Marine who was a refugee.
Also on January 25, the Death Valley National Park Twitter account began tweeting some subversive stuff.
The Death Valley account started tweeting about internment camps that Japanese-Americans were put in during World War II.
This was a time when the American government used discrimination to limit American freedom, and Trump's ideas have echoed this, to many people's fears.
This is seen by many as the Death Valley account picking up the baton from Badlands to undermine Trump and his policies.
We'll see if the accounts will be further stopped and censored (which would be worrisome) and how the social media resistance continues.
Citations: These heroic guerrilla scientists and librarians are racing to save environmental data from Trump (Quartz), National Park Service Banned From Tweeting After Anti-Trump Retweets [Updated] (Gizmodo), Did park rangers start new, off-hours twitter aimed at Trump? (Seattle PI), FOR MY HOME, MY HOMELAND (Marines)
