Billionaire-turned-Democratic presidential candidate Michael Bloomberg has taken a severe thrashing on social media, after his campaign posted, and then deleted, fake Bernie Sanders quotes hailing alleged "despots. "

Bloomberg’s social media team took aim at the Vermont senator with a series of tweets mocking his factually accurate statement that literacy in Cuba skyrocketed under Fidel Castro.

The official ‘Team Bloomberg’ Twitter account shot off a series of posts in which they imagined what Sanders perhaps thinks of other “famous despots.” The fake quotes included flattering remarks about Stalin (“[he] spurred industrial production throughout the country, but all everyone wants to talk about is putting 14 million people in gulags!”) and even a bizarre blurb about Russian President Vladimir Putin, who apparently “poisons anyone who disagrees with him.” Sanders likes him because he looks good without a shirt — according to the Bloomberg campaign’s fictitious quote. The tweets were followed by the rather disingenuous hashtag, #BernieOnDespots.

The Bloomberg campaign is tweeting completely fabricated Bernie quotes.Just straight-up posting disinformation. pic.twitter.com/uqcWYTkaYV — 💯Fergus Ryan (@fryan) February 24, 2020

Unsurprisingly, it wasn’t long before the make-believe statements were wiped from the Twitter account. Equally unsurprising was the enormous backlash that the stunt provoked.

Many people noted that the incendiary tweets were a lackluster attempt at satire, and seemed more like an attempt at character assassination.

"satire" is apparently when you just make things up that do not remotely resemble anything the "satirized" person has or would ever say and attribute it to them in an attempt at character assassination, okay cool — 🚩politics understander🏴🕙 (@ACorollaries) February 25, 2020

The tweets provided plenty of ammunition to those who were already critical of Bloomberg’s campaign — particularly its strategy of saturating social media with millennial-friendly ‘memes’ and other content aimed at humanizing the multi-billionaire. Bloomberg has assembled the “worst campaign in the history of online,” argued one Twitter observer. “All of these losers will go back to Bloomberg corporate or to work for Republicans.”

Others expressed relief that the offending tweets were deleted, and urged Bloomberg to take the next logical step and “delete his entire campaign."

I guess we must all now cancel @BarackObama.Because here he is, in 2016, praising the education system of Cuba. Something he did many times.Bernie said this 34 years earlier, in a grainy video from 1982 & its supposed to be a disqualifying scandal. pic.twitter.com/NhWChTLW8q — Shaun King (@shaunking) February 24, 2020

Although Sanders’ statements about Cuba have caused mass pandemonium on cable news networks, journalists and pundits have repeatedly pointed out that he’s far from the only American politician to give kudos to Castro. In 2016, Barack Obama openly praised Cuba’s education system.

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