Social media, especially Twitter, played a central role in the rise of Donald Trump from celebrity TV host and real-estate magnate to 45th president of the United States. So it seems fitting that Twitter was also the scene of a strange kind of guerrilla uprising on Tuesday against the Trump administration and its practices involving social media.
What seems to have triggered the revolt was the treatment of a National Parks Service account on the weekend. After it re-posted Twitter updates that called into question the size of the crowds at Trump’s inauguration, the account’s activity was frozen. The following day, the tweets in question had been deleted, replaced by an apology for “the mistaken retweets.”
Other government agencies, including the EPA and the USDA’s research arm, have also had their social-media accounts frozen indefinitely as of Tuesday, and staff memos have said that these accounts will likely be more “centrally controlled” in the future.
In the face of all this, the Twitter account for Badlands National Park in South Dakota posted a series of tweets on Tuesday calling attention to the rise of global warming, something President Trump has publicly referred to as a hoax. The posts drew cheers, along with thousands of re-tweets, and the account quickly gained tens of thousands of new followers.
Note: This was originally published at Fortune, where I was a senior writer from 2015 to 2017
Unfortunately for fans of the account, however, this short-lived rebellion was quickly put down. The tweets in question were deleted just hours after the series began — including one that quoted from the 1916 law that created the National Park Service. Whether Twitter becomes the chosen tool of other anti-Trump rebels within the administration remains to be seen.