Website links on nearly two dozen social media posts from Donald Trump in the early 2010s appear to have been tampered with.
‘Our clubhouse on the North Sea,’ the US President tweeted on what was called Twitter, now X, in June 2013.
But below it, a preview of the link showed the Wikipedia page for the Epstein files, the documents related to the sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.
Clicking the link – bit.ly/dZWRW9 – would also bring the user to this entry.
The web address was made using Bitly, a URL shortener often used at the time because of Twitter’s strict character limit.
Bitly shows that the link was replaced at 12.48am today, forcing it to load up the unconnected Wikipedia entry.
Another shortened website leads to a crude online game called ‘Fortnite Baby Clicker’, referring to the multiplayer video game.
This was on a post from Trump which read: ‘Another example of the destruction caused by wind turbines. Unnecessary waste–horrible!’
The Bitly link was similarly modified at 12.34am, no longer linking to the intended website.
A Trump tweet commenting on then-president Barack Obama’s presidency now includes a link to a YouTube video of viral meme characters marrying.
While another comment on Obama includes a link to a fan-made Linkin Park music video.
But two fast-food restaurant chains also had rejigged links.
‘Check out what our McDonald’s team in Sweden did. Pretty cool! ^Geo,’ McDonald’s official X account said in 2011.
Yet the preview for the link shows it’s for the Wikipedia page for the 9/11 terrorist attacks that brought down the Twin Towers in New York City.
Bitly that at 5.14am today, the link was changed to the unrelated 9/11 Wikipedia entry.
A post from Burger King, also shared in 2011, includes a Bitly link that leads users to an unintended Wikipedia webpage.
‘If you need to find a BURGER KING® restaurant Q-U-I-C-K, check out our handy restaurant locator,’ the since-deleted post says, according to an archived version.
Rather than the branch map, the Bitly link loads up a list on Wikipedia of concentration camps, used by the Nazi Party to kill 1.7million people.
Similarly, the Bitly address was altered at 5.32am, according to an expanded version of the link.
A Burger King spokesperson called the redirected post ‘strange’.
‘We are not entirely sure how this happened but this is of course not the original link of the post and it has been deleted,’ they added.
Why the Bitly links were changed is unclear.
But Alex Greenland, a security researcher, tells that the redirected links are ‘shocking’ and appear coordinated.
‘Tweets often show previews of links included in them,’ he says.
‘X routinely makes a request for the link, getting its final destination URL, and embeds the title and image of the link in the post from its Open Graph (OG) metadata.
‘If the final destination of a link is new, it will fetch a new title and image to display in the tweet.’
Greenland, co-founder of internet intelligence startup Epi Security, adds that shortened Bitly links do not expire.
‘They are not rotated or reused, no matter how old they are,’ he adds.
‘Bitly account holders can update their own links. If a Bitly account holder removes one of their links, it returns a 404 Not Found page and cannot be reused by anyone else.’
The White House, McDonald’s and Bitly have been approached for comment.
Get in touch with our news team by emailing us at webnews@metro.co.uk.
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