No, Mike Pence’s website has not been hacked. Please take a deep breath.
Proving time is a flat circle both on the internet and under the Trump administration, a Mike Pence parody website that's more than a year old has resurfaced again, and it's fooled some folks.
Web surfers visiting the website www.officialmikepence.com are treated to the below: what appears to be the vice president's official website, featuring some hilarious jokes and Pence positioning himself to succeed Donald Trump as president.
It must be a clever hack, right? At least, that's what some thought:
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Except it's not a hack at all. It's actually a brilliant parody website by Funny or Die and it's been up since April Fools Day 2017. It's been about a year since we saw the first wave of "this is not a hack, this is a parody" stories.
Last year, the site seemed to mostly evade mainstream attention until it was noted by Democratic strategist Scott Dworkin on August 9, 2017 and picked up by journalists and others from there.
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Why it's getting attention again a year later is hard to say. Newsweek did a little bit of digging and found a mention of the site on a BabyCenter message board, but no other real signal boost from a major site or influencer.
For what it's worth, at the time of writing the satirical site is the first result under a Google search for "Mike Pence official website" -- that's some darn good SEO, guys. And if you try, say, going to MikePence.com, you get redirected to (surprise!) Trump's website.
Even Pence's verified, non-VP Twitter account lists Trump's website so, yeah, you can't really blame folks for getting fooled.
Maybe one day Pence will get his own website -- if Trump lets him, that is.
Topics Politics
Marcus Gilmer is Mashable's Assistant Real-Times News Editor on the West Coast, reporting on breaking news from his location in San Francisco. An Alabama native, Marcus earned his BA from Birmingham-Southern College and his MFA in Communications from the University of New Orleans. Marcus has previously worked for Chicagoist, The A.V. Club, the Chicago Sun-Times and the San Francisco Chronicle.
