If you were flipping through your Twitter feed earlier today and what the heck came to mind, there was good reason. South Dakota's Badlands made the headlines Tuesday afternoon.

According to CBS News.com

Just days after The National Park Service (NPS) was forced to shut down its Twitter activity over two retweets the Department of the Interior deemed inconsistent with the agency’s mission, the Twitter account for Badlands National Park in South Dakota seems to have gone rogue.

If you think it sounds like someone with a political agenda working the system you're probably right.  CBS further explains:

This comes as the Trump administration has instituted a temporary media blackout at the Environmental Protection Agency, causing the EPA’s social media accounts to fall silent after Friday’s Inauguration Day. The EPA’s final tweet before the social media blackout simply reads, “@GinaEPA shares a report about actions taken by the agency under the Clean Air Act during the last eight years,” with a link to a blog post by now-former Obama EPA Administrator Gina McCarthy.

The tweets in question have been deleted from the organization's Twitter account, but as we all know, this is the internet and nothing is ever truly deleted. Here are the tweets in question:

The Washington Post is reporting that the tweets in question were posted by a former employee of the park:

According to a National Park Service official, who asked for anonymity because he was not authorized to speak on the record, the tweets are believed to have been posted by a former employee at the park in Interior, S.D., who still had access to the account.

Those tweets “were posted by a former employee who was not currently authorized to use the park’s account,” said the official. “The park was not told to remove the tweets but chose to do so when they realized that their account had been compromised.”

A good rule of thumb to remember is, just because you read something on the internet doesn't necessarily make it true. By the way, it might be a good time to review updating passwords on your socials as well!

Still some are viewing what was done as "brave." At one point the hashtag #Badasslands was trending.


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