A lot can happen in half an hour. Like when Aussie comedy faves The Chaser pretended to tweet as Donald Trump on election day before having their account yanked out of their hands.
At exactly 9:26 PM on Tuesday night (AEST), The Chaser put out a tweet saying “Don’t vote for me, I’m a massive idiot.” This was after voting had already started in the US.
The thing is, they also changed their name to “Donald J Trump” and used Trump’s twitter profile picture, too. The only way to spot the difference was by looking at the handle: @chaser.
As you can imagine, a lot of Aussies found it hilarious while a bunch more Americans began losing their gosh darned minds over it.
Very quickly, the account had its blue tick verification revoked. Then roughly half an hour after the tweet was posted, the whole account was suspended.
But it was too late. The tweet had already gotten around 1,100 retweets, over 200 quote-tweets, and almost 4,000 replies.
Twitter did not respond to a request for comment in time for publication, but it’s safe to say that that The Chaser being banned right after posting that tweet isn’t just a coincidence.
For a minute I was like… “I don’t follow that tosser… What the hell is he doing on my feed?”
Well played.
— Xenomorph 🇦🇺 (@xenomorph_v1) November 3, 2020
My heart stopped
— Eliza (@epar4283) November 3, 2020
what does it say that for a millisecond i thought this could be a real tweet he made?
— Strewth 🏳️⚧️🏳️🌈 (@StrewthQueen) November 3, 2020
“It’s impressive that Twitter only took 20 minutes to unverify our tweet – given it took them almost four years to start fact checking the actual President,” The Chaser’s website editor Cam Smith said in a follow-up article.
“I guess that’s to be expected though, we all know comedians words are much more dangerous than those of the guy who controls 50% of the world’s nukes.”
Back in the day, all the The Chaser needed was a rental car motorcade, a couple of Canadian flags and an Osama bin Laden costume in order to impersonate a world leader.
Nowadays, it seems, they can cause just as much of a stir with a few calculated keystrokes on election day.
Americans are a precious bunch, and Twitter has been cracking down on people impersonating either Trump or Joe Biden fairly strictly in the leadup to the vote.
Perhaps another classic of the genre was when comedian Jaboukie Young-White didn’t actually impersonate Biden, but instead pretended to be a CNN account and announced that Biden was not in fact dead (not that he ever was, ofc) but rather “getting some dick.”
In The Chaser’s case, it builds upon a long history of a) messing with Americans, b) impersonating politicians, and c) stirring shit in the best possible way on election day.
Unfortunately for us (and for them), it means we’ll now have to go without their tweets for the foreseeable future.
That said, many would have just two words to say after seeing what just went down: worth it.
