A massive link-hijacking scheme has turned corporate social media archives into bizarre and offensive redirects.
Posts from high-profile accounts — including fast-food giants McDonald’s and Burger King, as well as President Donald Trump — are getting hacked, with over decades-old links suddenly redirecting users to unrelated website links including links about 9/11 and the Holocaust.
An unknown party appears to be taking control of expired Bitly link shorteners—a widely used URL-shortening and link-management service—and altering their destinations.
Bitly is used to shorten, share, track, and brand web links, converting long website addresses into short clean links.
One 2011 post on Burger King’s official X account (1.8 million followers) that originally pointed to a restaurant locator was modified Sunday to redirect to a Wikipedia page detailing Nazi concentration camps.
Another Burger King tweet from July 13, 2011 — reading, “Now it’s even easier to eat right at BURGER KING® restaurants with @WeRRestaurants. All you need is a zip code!” — was warped to link straight to Adolf Hitler’s Wikipedia page.
It remains unclear how the shortened links across the corporate accounts were hijacked. Burger King told The Post that one of the altered posts has been yanked, though another remains live on their account.
McDonald’s official X handle was similarly slammed. A deleted post from Aug. 6, 2011, was tampered with to point to the Wikipedia page for the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, fitting a bizarre emerging pattern of corporate links pointing to historical tragedies.
McDonald’s and Bitly did not immediately respond to requests for comment from The Post.
Two posts on Donald Trump’s X account were also altered: a 2013 post redirected to a “Baby Fortnite” page, while a 2012 post linked to a video of Mario and Luigi from Super Mario Bros.
About 20 of Trump’s old X posts have been affected by link switches, all attached to this thread, including links to the Epstein Files and videos of the Transformers being attached to political posts.
The sudden link swap triggered widespread confusion and a wave of snarky memes across social media.
“It’s a phenomenon known as link rot. Websites go down, link shorteners expire, addresses move, so over time, old links stop pointing to where they once pointed,” one Reddit user noted. “Malicious people, or just people who think they’re funny, can then buy or otherwise acquire these expired domains, and redirect them elsewhere.”
The references to Nazis and 9/11 have users calling out the corporate giants. @StopAntisemites on X, a U.S.-based nonprofit, tagged Burger King in a post declaring: “Hiring a competent social media team is one of the most important hiring decisions a company can make. Case in Point”, referencing the concentration camp link.
One of Burger King’s posts and the McDonald’s post have both since been removed.
Outraged web users are also slamming Bitly over its flaw that allows links to “die” and be recycled by pranksters and bad actors.
“If you don’t plan to maintain something long term, it’s best not to use third-party services,” one X user wrote.
Brice Trophardy on X said this is a reminder to “not use link shorteners like Bitly on social media.”
