Twitter Is Roasting This Major Problem With Donald Trump’s “Fake News Awards”
Well, it looks like we spoke too soon. Just when we thought President Donald Trump completely overlooked his "Fake News Awards" on the day the winners were scheduled to be announced, Trump broke his silence and announced that the "votes" (?) are in — kind of. Trump tweeted a link to a page from the GOP official website that would then lead to the "winners" of these co-called awards. But when the link didn't work at first, Twitter users would absolutely not let Trump live it down. And these tweets about the "Fake News Awards" website malfunctions are absolutely incredible.
At 8:00 p.m. ET on Jan. 17, just when the Twitter-verse thought the day was through, Trump tweeted out a link to the winners of his "fakies" (as I like to call them). The link directed readers to the GOP's website and it should have taken them to the blog portion of the site, where the winners of "The Highly-Anticipated 2017 Fake News Awards" are supposed to be listed. But to the dismay of many curious readers, the page was unable to load and showed up as a white screen which stated, "The site is temporarily offline, we are working to bring it back up. Please try back later."
And you'd better believe that Twitter roasted Trump for not having a functioning webpage up and running.
Trump tweeted the link to his "Fake News Awards winners" in the late evening hours on Jan. 17.
But when the website wouldn't show, Twitter users tore Trump to shreds over it.
In the spirit of these "awards," my personal favorite roast-tweet of the night goes to...
It's pretty laughable that so much anticipation was built around these "fakies" only to have the website fail once they were officially announced. For a while many thought that the awards weren't going to happen on Jan. 17 — the day Trump said the "fakies" would be announced — and Twitter users called Trump out on it. Chrissy Teigen even staged a fake "Fake News Awards" (ha!) and posted a hilarious video of it to Twitter, trolling Trump on his failure to even mention the awards up to that time.
But Trump eventually did announce his "awards" at the 11th hour, and after a couple of hours of the website crashing (which was most likely due to the high volume of traffic the site was experiencing), by around 10 p.m. ET the page with the "fake news awards" winners was up and running. Trump essentially listed every time he believed the media coverage he received was incorrect, unfair, or biased. The page reads,
2017 was a year of unrelenting bias, unfair news coverage, and even downright fake news. Studies have shown that over 90% of the media’s coverage of President Trump is negative.
The first "fakie" was awarded to New York Times columnist Paul Krugman, who asserted that the economy would be hurt by Trump's election, followed by the false reporting of Trump from ABC's Brian Ross, and CNN's inaccurate reporting of Trump's campaign. Many of the reports here are ones that Trump can correctly claim were initially reported as inaccurate, but whose factual errors and mistakes were later addressed by their respective media companies.
The underlying force influencing these "fake news awards" may very well be Special Counsel Robert Mueller's Russia probe, which continues to investigate possible collusion between Trump's campaign and the Russian government during the 2016 election cycle. Trump's "awards" twice mentioned the possible collusion between his camp and Russia; in the seventh point the site states that CNN falsely "reported about Anthony Scaramucci’s meeting with a Russian" (the story was later retracted). And the entire final point outright says,
And last, but not least: "RUSSIA COLLUSION!" Russian collusion is perhaps the greatest hoax perpetrated on the American people. THERE IS NO COLLUSION!
If there is one thing we know Trump likes to do, it's to rile people up. Which these "awards" definitely did. Just maybe not in the way he wanted.
