Twitter bug could make it appear you liked Donald Trump’s tweets

Well this is awkward. 

A Twitter bug is making it appear as if accounts have liked tweets they haven’t — including those 240-character missives from our very own commander-in-chief. 

That’s right, your friends browsing their timelines might see your name next to an official Twitter notification saying you smashed that Like button on something you actually find repulsive. 

“[This] is a bug involving Likes that we’re working to fix,” explained a Twitter spokesperson over email. “This issue is affecting numerous accounts.” 

The bug appears to be specifically confined to the timeline, and thankfully has not spread to the list of tweets you liked that appears on your profile page. Say, for example, you saw that your staunchly liberal friend liked a tweet from Trump. Navigating to their account page and clicking on the “Likes” tab would not display the tweet in question. 

Still though, how many people are actually double-checking that when Twitter says you liked something you actually liked it? 

This has led some on the platform to speculate that the bug is an intentional ploy by Twitter to gin up engagement.

“Okay, so I’ve seen a lot of people upset because their followers are liking DJT’s stuff,” wrote one Twitter user. “This is a thing that Twitter is now doing to attempt to make us ‘get out of our bubbles.’  Oh, and they totally didn’t like his tweets.”

The suspicion is not totally out of the blue, as just last month the Washington Post reported that Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey is “experimenting with features that would promote alternative viewpoints in Twitter’s timeline to address misinformation and reduce ‘echo chambers.’”

Again, though, Twitter says the bogus Likes are just a bug. 

A follow up email to Twitter seeking to confirm whether this error is happening with tweets from accounts other than the president’s was unreturned as of press time. We also sought to determine how widespread the bug is, but likewise received no response. 

Regardless, this should serve to remind you that not everything on social media is exactly what it seems. Which, hey, maybe that’s a good thing.