The National Parks Service was banned from Twitter by the Trump Administration after retweeting a New York Times reporter who compared aerial crowd photos from Donald Trump’s and Barack Obama’s inaugurations. But some tweeters, claiming to be Parks Service employees, say they’ve gone rogue to defy the ban.
The Department of the Interior issued a complete gag order on the Parks Service Twitter account on Tuesday, claiming that they were investigating whether the account had been hacked.
“We have received direction from the Department through [the Washington Support Office] that directs all [Department of Interior] bureaus to immediately cease use of government Twitter accounts until further notice,” the order read. Social media communication shutdowns quickly spread to the EPA and USDA and other official government accounts also got noticeably quieter.
A Twitter account for South Dakota’s Badlands National Park, a subsidiary of the National Parks Service, had tweeted out World Wildlife Federal facts about climate change, in defiance of the ban, and, it seems, of Trump himself.
The Tweetstorm lasted a few hours before Badlands National Park went back to radio silence, and all of the climate change tweets were deleted.
Then Tuesday evening, an “unofficial” National Parks Service Twitter popped up, @AltUSNatlParkSer, claiming to be run by the “Unofficial ‘Resistance’ team of U.S. National Park Service. Not taxpayer subsidized!” The account opened by congratulating the Badlands National Park team and went from there.
In under 24 hours, the account has already tweeted hundreds of times, mostly pointed attacks on Donald Trump, with a handful of retweets covering environmental issues from the Dakota Access Pipeline to climate change.
Left-leaning outlets are celebrating the triumphant, subversive return of Parks Service employees to Twitter, in defiance of the Trumpian ban. But Alternative National Parks Service seems to be, at least partly, a clever advertising strategy for the “Science March on Washington,” an event it has promoted about once an hour since the account popped up.
The Science March was an idea born on Reddit, and has its own Facebook page, Twitter account and subreddit. News of the March appeared on CNN and Gizmodo on Wednesday, just as the Twitter account was peaking in popularity.
According to organizers—college professors from NYU, University of Texas, and elsewhere—they hope to replicate, and perhaps expand, on the success of the Women’s March on Washington, with similar demonstrations in DC and a number of satellite cities. No date for the march has been provided.
Meanwhile, the National Parks Service Twitter returned to operation on Wednesday, but appears to be restricted to tweeting mostly innocuous travel information.