A Whale Or A Giraffe? Melania Trump’s Twitter Image From Six Years Ago Mysteriously Changes
Move over, blue dress (or was it white?), there’s a new social media phenomenon that’s going to irk the heck out of a lot of people.
This time, however, it’s not an optical illusion that’s at work, but instead, it seems that a technical glitch is at play. And it’s affecting an image that first lady Melania Trump posted more than six years ago.
In August, 2012, Trump posted a picture of a beluga whale to her Twitter account, according to reporting from BNO News. She asked her followers to consider a rather deep question.
“What is she thinking?” Trump wrote.
Late on Saturday night, the image unexpectedly changed into a giraffe.
The image itself has been retweeted more than 47,000 times, and people still reply to it. So one mystery about the photograph is solved — why was anyone looking at a tweet from 2012?
That said, the image change drove Twitter users to wonder what exactly was happening. The giraffe was seen by several users, but some still claimed to see the whale.
“Right so jokes aside, what’s the deal? are some people seeing a giraffe?” BuzzFeed’s Cates Holderness said in a tweet.
She explained further that she didn’t see a giraffe.
“Fascinating,” Holderness wrote in a subsequent tweet. “I’ve tried it on phone and laptop in, like, all the browsers and apps and only see the beluga.”
Ah god damn I saw the whale then I texted the link to myself and got the giraffe pic.twitter.com/8NOxIaUHwI
— Paul F. Tompkins (@PFTompkins) December 30, 2018
Twitter does not allow tweets to get edited, so there’s no way that it’s possible that Trump herself changed the pic from a whale to a giraffe.
The phenomenon is apparently not all that uncommon, per Deadspin. It seems that often, the URL image ID of posts made several years in the past can change as new images are uploaded to the social media site, which means that someone likely posted a pic of a giraffe in their own tweet, and Twitter simply used the same URL address for that image as the one Trump used for the beluga whale.
If that’s the case, Trump should count her lucky stars that the new image wasn’t anything controversial. The Chicago Cubs once had the same thing happen to them, with an image of Hall of Fame player Billy Williams singing during the 7th inning stretch being replaced by a screenshot of a pornography scene.
Twitter has yet to comment on the change in scenery. All things considered, however, Trump’s original caption still works for the new image of the giraffe — what is she thinking?
