National Park Service Workers Step Up Twitter Campaign Against Trump
LOS ANGELES (CBSLA.com/AP) — The National Park Service employees' Twitter campaign against President Donald Trump has spread to other parks.
A day after three climate-related tweets sent out by Badlands National Park were deleted, other park accounts have sent out tweets that appear to defy Trump.
One, by Redwoods National Park, notes that redwood groves are nature's No. 1 carbon sink, which capture greenhouse gas emissions that contribute to global warming. Trump has called climate change a hoax.
"More redwoods would mean less #climatechange," the park said in a tweet.
The tweets went beyond climate change. Death Valley National Park tweeted photos of Japanese Americans interned there during World War II, a message that some saw as objecting to Trump's pledge to ban Muslims from entering the country and a proposal to restrict the flow of refugees to the United States.
A park service spokesman declined to comment Wednesday.
Three climate-related tweets sent out by Badlands National Park have been deleted after they went viral on Twitter, sparking debate over whether the park was defying the Trump administration.
The South Dakota park posted tweets Tuesday that accurately quoted climate science data, including the current record-setting high concentrations of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.
The tweets were shared thousands of times, and the Democratic National Committee circulated the message by email with the subject line "Resist."
The tweets came just three days after the Interior Department briefly suspended its Twitter accounts after the park service retweeted photos about turnout at Trump's inauguration, which the president has claimed without evidence was larger than reported by news media. The accounts were reactivated the next day.
White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer pushed back on reports Wednesday that federal agencies have been directed to limit social media communications.
"They haven't been directed by us to do anything," he told reporters. "That directive did not come from here."
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