Once More Around the trump Bullshit Merry-Go-Round

Escaping the shrieking maw of Twitter aboard the hashtag #CNNblackmail, a story started circulating today about the news network threatening to release the personal information of a 15-year-old who made a gif tweeted by Donald Trump. Every one of those details, however, is utterly false, as was the case with the last dozen or so stories invented by the internet’s pro-Trump spheres of influence.

Here’s an approximate timeline of this week’s trip into unreality:

On July 2, the president tweeted the above gif, which takes footage of an appearance Trump made on WWE in 2007 and superimposes the CNN logo on the head of his opponent, Vince McMahon. A similar gif was posted to r/the_donald—the largest pro-Trump community on Reddit—by a user named HanAssholeSolo less than a week prior, and a moderator of the subreddit was quick to congratulate him.