Atlanta Resident Trolls Giuliani, Gets International Attention
Rudolph Giuliani. Image via Wikimedia Commons.
An Atlanta resident and a missing space between sentences caused quite the headache for Rudolph Giuliani late last week, and the Twitter fallout has been impressive.
Last Friday president Trump’s lawyer tweeted a criticism of special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation. This isn’t out of the ordinary for Giuliani; however, a missing space between two sentences turned what should have been normal text into a hyperlink.
“I kind of chuckled a little bit that he created this accidental link,” Jason Velazquez, told The Washington Post. The Atlanta-based digital marketing director said he “knew immediately that it was just a typo,” but he clicked on the link anyway – quickly realizing the domain was unregistered.
Realizing his opportunity, Velazquez purchased the domain for www.g-20.in and populating it with the words “Donald J. Trump is a traitor to our county.” He also added a link to a Reddit discussion thread on Mueller’s decision to not recommend jail time for ex-National Security Advisor Michael Flynn due to his “substantial” cooperation in the investigation.
The move infuriated Giuliani, the Post reports, who again took to Twitter to complain that “Twitter allowed someone to invade my text with a disgusting anti-President message,” Giuliani tweeted, adding that the “same thing-period no space-occurred later and it didn’t happen.” The Post notes Giuliani was probably referencing part of the Nov. 30 tweet that read “Helsinki.Either,” which is not a valid domain.
A Twitter spokesman balked at the claim, telling The New York Times “the accusation we’re artificially injecting something into a tweet is completely false,” adding that Twitter is actually designed to prevent tweets from being edited.
Predictably, social media had a field day. At the time of this writing, Giuliani’s tweet had 17,248 retweets and 46,827 likes. The tweet, and subsequent misunderstanding of what caused the anti-Trump message, is particularly embarrassing for Guiliani, who serves as one of the nation’s top cybersecurity advisors.
Even Mexico’s former president (and outspoken Trump critic) took notice:
Velazquez told the Post that Giuliani’s accusatory follow-up tweet “speaks to the impulsive nature of the administration where they’re not thoughtful in anything they put out there, especially on Twitter.”