Elon Musk’s Pepe The Frog Tweet Decried By ADL As His Overnight Tweetstorm Also Highlights Guns, Revolutionary War Imagery & Fabricated CNN Headline
29.11.2022 - 00:15
/ deadline.com
Just five days ago Elon Musk promised, “More and more over time, as we hew closer to the truth, Twitter will earn the trust of the people.” Then, the new owner of Twitter fired off a series of questionable posts overnight that drew rebuke from the Anti-Defamation League, CNN and many of the platform’s users.
Beginning about 2 a.m., the world’s wealthiest man tweeted a report attributing to CNN the idea that “Elon Musk could threaten free speech on Twitter by literally allowing people to speak freely.” Problem is, according to CNN Communications in a reply to Musk’s tweet, the “headline never appeared on CNN.”
What’s more, the headline and image attached to it are old, so old that a simple Google search would have shown that they were debunked by AP in April and traced back to a satirical website. Not only is the headline made up, it doesn’t even seem to be based on a the content of any CNN story, according to Emily Kuhn, senior director of communications at CNN Digital Worldwide. She told AP at the time, “It’s a fabricated image and not an actual report from CNN.”
According to Snopes, a Community Note was then attached to Musk’s post over night which read, “The screencap in this image is not real and originated from a satirical website. CNN aired no such report about Musk ‘threatening free speech’ and the chyron has been digitally altered to add the text.”
Of course, Musk himself railed against unmarked parody accounts earlier this month including the warning that “going forward, any Twitter handles engaging in impersonation without clearly specifying ‘parody’ will be permanently suspended.”
So what was Musk’s reply to his CNN mistake this morning?
“Lmaoooo.”
Lmaoooo
Also overnight, Musk posted an image of what he