Rudy Giuliani, a Trump cybersecurity adviser, doesn’t understand the internet

Welcome back to the latest edition of politicians don’t get technology! Our latest guest is Rudy Giuliani, former New York mayor and current cybersecurity adviser to President Trump.

Rudy Giuliani doesn’t understand Twitter or the internet.

It’s embarrassing enough that Giuliani inadvertently tweeted a link to a website criticizing Trump, but now he is doubling down on cyberstupidity by claiming that “Twitter allowed someone to invade my text with a disgusting anti-President message.”

Ignorant as to what had happened, he latched on to apparent anti-Republican bias within Twitter, a theme that Trump and other Republicans have pushed despite no evidence.

“Don’t tell me they are not committed cardcarrying anti-Trumpers,” added Giuliani, who — we repeat — is a cybersecurity adviser to the White House.

The explanation is quite simple.

Giuliani’s original tweet on November 30 (above) didn’t contain a period between sentences, which created a hyperlink to G-20.in. An eagle-eyed member of the public — named by the BBC as Atlanta-based marketing director Jason Velazquez — clicked through the link and, finding that it was blank, quickly registered the domain and created a website carrying the “a disgusting anti-President message” to which Giuliani referred.

The G-20.in website that appears in Giuliani’s tweet

“When I realised that the URL was available, my heart began to race a bit. I remember thinking: ‘This guy — Giuliani — has no idea,'” Velazquez told the BBC. “I quickly upload my files, tweeted about what I had done, and left my apartment.”

The tweet itself was well-covered by media, but Giuliani’s absurd return to the topic has given the site even more coverage.

Both of Giuliani’s tweets remain online and undeleted — as of 22:40 PST — but, in the positive count, it does appear that he has figured out how to create Twitter threads by replying to previous tweets.

This incident follows another moment of Twitter-based comedy from Giuliani when he sent a curious message following news that Trump’s ex-attorney Michael Cohen had made a plea agreement.

That tweet recalled Trump’s own “covfefe” typo last year.