Badlands National Park defies Trump social media policy, tweets about climate change

(WSVN) - Someone’s probably getting fired.

It appears that a staffer manning the Twitter account of Badlands National Park has gone rogue, sending out a series of tweets on climate change in seeming defiance of the Trump administration’s new social media policy. Mere hours after appearing on their Twitter feed, the posts disappeared.

“The pre-industrial concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere was 280 parts per million (ppm). As of December 2016, 404.93 ppm,” one tweet said.

Shortly after the first tweet, two more appeared, saying, “Today, the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is higher than at any time in the last 650,000 years. #climate”, followed by, “Flipside of the atmosphere; ocean acidity has increased 30% since the Industrial Revolution. “Ocean Acidification” #climate #carboncycle”.

Nearly an hour and a half went by before the final tweet appeared: “Burning one gallon of gasoline puts nearly 20lbs of carbon dioxide into our atmosphere. #climate”.

While the tweets themselves did not appear out of the ordinary, they raised eyebrows since they came just after reports of the new administration’s policy banning some government agencies from posting on social media, including the Environmental Protection Agency.

The National Park Service may, in fact, be the reason for the new policy. The U.S. Department of the Interior was ordered to suspend operation of its Twitter accounts Friday, according to the Washington Post.

“All bureaus and the department have been directed by incoming administration to shut down Twitter platforms immediately until further notice,” said an email sent to Park Service employees Friday, according to the Post.

The move came as the main National Parks Service Twitter account was temporarily taken offline, after it re-tweeted photos that compared the crowd sizes of President Obama’s 2009 inauguration to President Trump’s.

The Democratic National Committee pounced on the apparently-forbidden Badlands tweets.

“How long will it take for the Twitter account of Badlands National Park Service to be suspended for its defiance?” said Adrienne Watson, press secretary for the Democratic National Committee.

The tweets were viewable until around 5:30 p.m. Tuesday, when they disappeared from the Badlands National Park Twitter page.

President Trump had previously posted that he believed global warming was a hoax created by China.

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