A rogue New York Post employee was fired on Thursday after they published a series of racist, lewd, and violent headlines about Hunter Biden, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY), New York Gov. Kathy Hochul, and her Republican rival Lee Zeldin, among others.
The newspaper initially claimed the incident was the result of a breach, saying in a statement that “The New York Post has been hacked and we’re currently investigating the cause.”
Hours later, however, the paper said an internal probe indicated the offending headlines came from inside the building and the employee responsible was canned.
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“The New York Post’s investigation indicates that the unauthorized conduct was committed by an employee, and the employee has been terminated,” it said in the updated statement. “This morning, we immediately removed the vile and reprehensible content from our website and social media accounts.”
The chaos started just around 9 a.m. Thursday, where headlines popped up along the Post’s website and app describing political figures in vulgar and racist terms.
“Zeldin: Eric Adams is NYC’s fried chicken eating monkey,” read one such headline, while another blared: “Gov. Abbott: I will order border patrol to start slaughtering illegals.” A third headline faked a vulgar quote from Zeldin about sexually assaulting Hochul, his New York gubernatorial race rival.
National figures were also unspared: One headline said America must “assassinate AOC,” while another headline posed as conservative columnist Miranda Devine calling for the killing of Hunter and Joe Biden.
Those articles then found their way onto the Post’s Twitter page through the social management system SocialFlow, which pushes out a series of tweets for news organizations.
The contents within the published articles themselves seemed to either duplicated copy from elsewhere or unchanged articles that had yet to be published—the result being seemingly normal news stories or columns with the crude headlines. The stories have been removed from the Post’s website as of late Thursday morning.
