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Hillary Clinton Plagiarized Twitter Joke

/ AP
June 10, 2016

Hillary Clinton plagiarized a popular internet joke calling upon Donald Trump to delete his Twitter account, a Washington Free Beacon analysis reveals.

When the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee asked her Republican counterpart to remove his account from the popular social networking site, she was retweeted more than 400,000 times. (Retweeting is the popular practice of forwarding a tweet to one's followers.)

The content of Clinton's tweet was not original, however. An exhaustive analysis by the Free Beacon has found that thousands of Twitter users have previously asked the Republican nominee to "delete" his account.

Clinton's plagiarism comes as "emoji art" from the Democratic strategist Laura Olin has been stolen by numerous Twitter users, according to the Washington Post. "Not by just anyone, mind you," the Post reported. "In the hours after Olin’s tweet *celebrating a great moment for women* [sic] went viral, it was apparently lifted, without credit, by a series of men. Many of them were themselves journalists or political operatives; several have since deleted their tweets after followers objected."

"They [the men who appropriated her original work] apparently had zero appreciation of the irony," an Olin told the Post in an interview conducted via Twitter.

Hillary Clinton did not respond to requests for comment on her use of social media made using social media.