But because social media jokes and political discourse are sometimes indistinguishable, in a time when Twitter and the White House have become inextricably linked, the satirical post also became fodder for political and societal commentary.

Fox News pounced on the viral tweet as evidence of how easily “Trump trashers” could be fooled into believing anything negative about the president. Farhad Manjoo, a New York Times columnist, admonished people for sharing fake screenshots, saying “the jokes just don’t work in a partisan-echo-chamber-feed world.”

Jennifer Stromer-Galley, the former president of the Association of Internet Researchers and a professor at Syracuse University, said the gorilla channel meme had spread thanks to people’s willingness to suspend disbelief and their susceptibility to confirmation bias — the same reasons that fake news accounts are able to take hold, she said.

“This is a bit more harmless, but it’s part of a larger challenge,” she said in an interview on Saturday. “It does raise questions for how we try to empower the public to better sort out what’s true from fiction.”

In an email, Mr. Ward wrote that he has been doing fake screenshots on Twitter for a long time, and he always tried “to make them ridiculous enough that it’s clear they’re jokes.”

“But there’s always at least a few people who think the joke is real,” he continued. “I’m not sure this says anything about the state of society. I think it’s just that people assess what they’re reading in the context it’s presented in, so some people won’t realize they’re looking at a joke unless you explicitly say ‘this is a joke.’”