A national park in South Dakota appeared to go rogue Tuesday, tweeting out climate change statistics — which were scrubbed from the internet hours later — in defiance of President Trump.
“Today, the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is higher than at any time in the last 650,000 years. #climate,” read one of the deleted messages, posted on the Badlands National Park’s Twitter account throughout the day.
“Burning one gallon of gasoline puts nearly 20lbs of carbon dioxide into our atmosphere,” another said.
The posts — while initially appearing authentic — turned out to be from a former employee who was able to somehow gain access to the account, National Park Service officials told Buzzfeed.
“Several tweets posted on the Badlands National Park’s Twitter account today were posted by a former employee who was not currently authorized to use the park’s account,” an official said in a statement. “The park was not told to remove the tweets but chose to do so when they realized that their account had been compromised.”
The messages were deleted around 5:30 p.m. Tuesday — but not before sparking a wave of online stories and tweets about who wrote them and why.
“For a few hours, Badlands National Parks was bad to the bone in defiance of Trump,” read the headline of a Washington Post article.
Anti-Trumpers even managed to get the hashtag “#Badasslands” trending on Twitter at one point.
“Thanks to for stepping up and saying what science has proven. Stay strong,” said one user.
According to Quartz, the Badlands superintendent had no clue about the tweets — due to a massive blizzard that occupied his staff. To make matters worse, their social media manager reportedly was working from home at the time.
While national parks are allowed to post park and public safety information on Twitter, officials told Buzzfeed that they’re supposed to shy away from “content related to national policy issues.”
Trump has been a vocal opponent of climate change in the past, even going so far as to call it a “hoax.” His administration has acted to remove all mentions of the topic from federal websites.
The park’s decision to scrub the global warming-related tweets didn’t sit too well with some people — who claimed it was censorship.
“Vladimir Putin would be proud,” joked Adrienne Watson, Democratic National Committee national press secretary.
“Authoritarianism gets its foothold through censorship,” wrote one Twitter user. “Badlands National Park is just the beginning.”
The tweets on Tuesday, while defiant, may not come as a surprise to some.
Badlands also tweeted a fact about climate change during Trump’s inauguration.
“#ClimateChange has implications for naval force structure and operations,” they said. “Factors driving this include: Water & resource challenges” @USNavy.”
Just last week, the National Park Service was forced to apologize after it retweeted pictures showing how Trump’s inauguration crowd was smaller than President Obama’s in 2009.
Since then, Trump reportedly has implemented a social media policy temporarily banning certain agencies from tweeting and conversing with the media.
According to the Associated Press, the Environmental Protection Agency is one of the agencies that’s been instructed to stay off Twitter and away from the press.
