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The internet might have been duped. Again.
ByChristine Wang on
Credit: kittenfeed.com
The internet may have been duped once again, us included.
Earlier this week, a supposed 17-year-old named Lucy made headlines across multiple news sites (including Mashable) when she claimed that President Trump's lawyers were pressuring her to shut down her website Kittenfeed.com (formerly TrumpScratch), where you can 'scratch' Trump's face with digital kitten paws.
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Facebook and Google join forces to wage war against fake newsThe story went viral, of course, because the idea that the President of the United States was taking time out of his day to concern himself with a nonsense little website like this was mind-boggling.
But it turns out the big story may actually have been a big non-story.
Gizmodo pointed out an inconsistency Thursday, between what was claimed by Lucy as the date the website published and what is officially on the record.
According to the original story on the Observer, Lucy received the first cease and desist letter from the Trump administration on March 1, "three weeks after the site went live." However, according to the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), Trumpscratch.com (the original name of the website) wasn't actually published until March 22.
Searching ICANN's database reveals the creation date of 3/22/17.Credit: screenshot, whois.icann.org
As Gizmodo puts it, "You can’t send a cease and desist over a website that doesn’t exist. To put even more plainly, March 22 is after March 1."
Gizmodo also points out that the website kittenfeed.com was registered before Trumpscratch.com, which would make no sense if you were to follow Lucy's story that she had to move TrumpScratch over to KittenFeed. Looking up Kittenfeed.com in ICANN's database reveals a creation date of March 2, well before the supposed "original" site.
Credit: screenshot, whois.icann.org
So it seems that this kitten-filled website may not have been what we thought it was, and we apologize for that. We maybe should have seen the Rick Astley song embedded at the bottom of the website and known better.
As Gizmodo says, the person that could clarify all of this would be the elusive Lucy. But until that person comes forward, then we'll have to just keep doubting the output of a dubious internet.
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TopicsDonald Trump
Christine is a Web Culture Intern at Mashable. She has previously written for FanSided and Saturday Down South. She has a B.A. from the University of California, San Diego and an M.S. from Hunter College. Before she started writing, she worked in education as a teacher and school leader for four years. Her special talents include being able to quote The Office on command, playing non-stop Overwatch for hours, and composing only the wittiest of Tweets (her own opinion).
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