More Federal Agencies Go Rogue On Twitter Defying Trump
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WASHINGTON (CBSMiami) -- They're representing climate change in the name of science and facts, they claim, and are fighting back against the perceived war the Trump administration has waged with a media blackout of federal agencies.
What started by rogue staff members at the Badlands National Park, a rugged expanse in South Dakota, and using the alternative Twitter handle @AltUSNatParkService, has now snowballed into more than 50 similar accounts from apparent fed up federal employees, including park rangers, members of the weather service, environmental protection agency, fish & wildlife, other science and research groups, and even NASA.
None of these accounts are verified, of course. And it's impossible to know if each account is represented by who they claim to be.
The alleged rogue officials, however, are tweeting out en masse their resistance to climate change denial and other issues where science and fact deserve the final say.
The verified National Park Service's Twitter account was shut down by the Department of the Interior over the weekend in an apparent vendetta against photos posted that compared President Trump's smaller inauguration crowd to Barack Obama's 2009 crowd.
Several tweets were ordered to be deleted. They were statements such as, "Today, the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is higher than at any time in the last 650,000 years. #climate" and "The pre-industrial concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere was 280 parts per million (ppm). As of December 2016, 404.93 ppm."
The EPA's social media was blacked out, as well. EPA contracts and grants were frozen. They were initially ordered to take down the climate change website before it was put back up a day later.
The moves fueled a movement online, however, with the alternative park's account, and now commonly referred to as "Badasslands Park" around the web, quickly gaining 1.25 million followers and spawning a rush of other accounts to pop up.
Many accounts claim to consist of "unofficial teams" of federal workers "dedicated to protecting it against the powers that be," like the bio for @YosemiteUprisin says.
