Billionaire-turned-Democratic presidential candidate Michael Bloomberg has taken a severe thrashing on social media, after his campaign posted, and then deleted, fake Bernie Sanders quotes hailing alleged "despots. "
Bloomberg’s social media team took aim at the Vermont senator with a series of tweets mocking his factually accurate statement that literacy in Cuba skyrocketed under Fidel Castro.
The official ‘Team Bloomberg’ Twitter account shot off a series of posts in which they imagined what Sanders perhaps thinks of other “famous despots.” The fake quotes included flattering remarks about Stalin (“[he] spurred industrial production throughout the country, but all everyone wants to talk about is putting 14 million people in gulags!”) and even a bizarre blurb about Russian President Vladimir Putin, who apparently “poisons anyone who disagrees with him.” Sanders likes him because he looks good without a shirt — according to the Bloomberg campaign’s fictitious quote. The tweets were followed by the rather disingenuous hashtag, #BernieOnDespots.
Unsurprisingly, it wasn’t long before the make-believe statements were wiped from the Twitter account. Equally unsurprising was the enormous backlash that the stunt provoked.
Many people noted that the incendiary tweets were a lackluster attempt at satire, and seemed more like an attempt at character assassination.
The tweets provided plenty of ammunition to those who were already critical of Bloomberg’s campaign — particularly its strategy of saturating social media with millennial-friendly ‘memes’ and other content aimed at humanizing the multi-billionaire. Bloomberg has assembled the “worst campaign in the history of online,” argued one Twitter observer. “All of these losers will go back to Bloomberg corporate or to work for Republicans.”
Others expressed relief that the offending tweets were deleted, and urged Bloomberg to take the next logical step and “delete his entire campaign."
Although Sanders’ statements about Cuba have caused mass pandemonium on cable news networks, journalists and pundits have repeatedly pointed out that he’s far from the only American politician to give kudos to Castro. In 2016, Barack Obama openly praised Cuba’s education system.
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