US President Donald J Trump’s lawyer and long-time associate Rudy Giuliani on Friday wrote a tweet attacking special counsel Robert Mueller, who is investigating into Russian meddling into the 2016 US elections and possible collusion with the Trump campaign and has already indicted several of former Trump aides.
On the face of it, it seemed a routine attack by Trump's lawyer on Mueller, whose investigation Trump has several times loathed as a "witchhunt".
However, there was a catch. By leaving no space between sentences, Giuliani had inadvertently enabled a hyperlink "G-20.In" in the tweet, which redirected to an India-based website.
This happened because Twitter by default recognises the letters following a full-stop in any hyperlink as representing an established top-level domain (TLD) name, which in this case, was ".in", meaning an Indian domain name.
Advertisement
Interestingly, Giuliani was named as the "cybersecurity adviser" to president Trump in 2017. He also reportedly owns a cybersecurity firm.
While it was an inadvertent error which should have been harmless for Giuliani and Trump, prankster Jason Velazquez was quick to site the mischief potential in the tweet and upon finding out that the domain was open to purchase, he bought it for $5.
Once he had the domain to himself, Velazquez quickly set upon creating a page that displayed a message attacking Trump "Donald J Trump is a traitor to our country".
As the word about his faux pas spread on social media, it created another embarrassing controversy for Giuliani, who has previously been trolled for his incorrect and inadvertent tweets.
Advertisement
Twitter users jumped in with their take on the saga with witty comments. Some even thanked India, only because of the domain name of course.
Mexico's former President Vicente Fox Quesada, who has publicly expressed his displeasure with Trump's policies in the past year, tweeting the URL said "Whoever is behind the g-20.in , is a goddamn genius!"
When Giuliani realised that his twitter fumble was being exploited by users to poke fun at him Trump, he ranted about it in a follow-up tweet on Wednesday, blaming Twitter for his own fault saying "they are card-carrying anti-Trumpers."
However, no one bought into Giuliani's belated blame game antics, as was made clear by many users on Twitter.
