Satirical “Bicycle Lobby” Twitter Account Fakes Out Media Giants

2:34 PM EDT on July 22, 2014

The parody Twitter account "Bicycle Lobby" jokingly claimed to have placed white flags on top of the Brooklyn bridge this week. Reporters from the AP and New York Daily News didn't get it. — Reporters from the AP and New York Daily News took a tweet from the @BicycleLobby account a little too seriously.

The @BicycleLobby Twitter account is a parody inspired by last year's unhinged rant about bike-share from Wall Street Journal columnist Dorothy Rabinowitz. Its running joke for the past 13 months has been that "the all-powerful bike lobby" envisioned by Rabinowitz is real -- and yes, it controls the universe.

Sample tweet from July 20: "Today is the 45th anniversary of the day we faked the Moon landing."

So when someone noticed this morning that the American flags atop the Brooklyn Bridge had been replaced with white flags, naturally @BicycleLobby took credit:

Screen Shot 2014-07-22 at 1.50.49 PM — false

The funny thing is, some big news organizations took the bait. First the New York Daily News and then the Associated Press reported that bicyclists had claimed credit for the prank. Not long after, those early reports were scrubbed from the Daily News site and the paper was calling it a mystery. But News 1130 in Vancouver, BC, was still carrying the AP story at 2 p.m.

Screen Shot 2014-07-22 at 1.59.19 PM — Click to enlarge

No one seemed to be enjoying it more than the mysterious @BicycleLobby author:

To be fair, we don't reveal we're a parody account until the second line of our profile. pic.twitter.com/fnS8um2tgO
— Bike Lobby (@BicycleLobby) July 22, 2014

If you believe we're for real, we have a bridge in Brooklyn we'd like to sell you.
— Bike Lobby (@BicycleLobby) July 22, 2014

Angie Schmitt

Angie is a Cleveland-based writer with a background in planning and newspaper reporting. She has been writing about cities for Streetsblog for six years.