In February 2025, reports appeared on the Internet about attackers who allegedly gained access to the verified account of the President of the United States and posted there a photo in which the politician was captured without clothes. We have verified the authenticity of this story.
Publications about the hacking of the profile of the American president on the social network X went viral on February 4. For example, Telegram channel "Live broadcast” (700,000 views at the time of writing this analysis) described it this way: “Naked Trump appeared on Twitter. Hackers hacked his account and changed the picture in his post from 2011.” According to the TGStat service, similar Russian-language posts about "nude» President of the United States received several million views on Telegram. Among the most popular are channel recordings “Technomotel"(272,000), "KB+"(263,000), "Evil proof️"(212,000), "Mediaka"(192,000), 4ch (182,000), "Trending today"(162,000), "Truthfulness"(153,000), Shtoll News (137,000), "Barrel of black caviar"(134,000), "Banks, money, two offshores"(111,000) and 1337 (106,000). You can also find such posts on VKontakte (examples here And here).
Some resources, however, clarified that, most likely, we are only talking about changing the link to a third-party resource that Trump shared more than ten years ago, and the authenticity of the viral photo has not been confirmed. Among them - Baza (491,000 views) and "Lentach”(152,000), where they added: “Trump in the photo, someone similar to him, or is it even photoshopped - unknown.” This did not stop some Russian media outlets from publishing stories with headlines like “Donald Trump published a naked photo of himself” (“Gazeta.ru") or "Unknown people hacked Trump's X profile and published his naked photo there" (Life.ru).
All the posts and notes mentioned above talk about tweet, published on Trump's official social media account X on April 15, 2011 (then the platform was called Twitter). The billionaire wrote that day: “My thoughts on @hannityshow (TV show hosted by Sean Hannity - Ed.) and my performance on"Tea party“(Rally against the White House fiscal policy. - Ed.) this weekend...” The post also included a link: http://bit.ly/gnMeEl.
At the time of writing this analysis, there is no photo in the tweet, but recently you could actually see a photo of a Trump-like naked man being sprayed by someone. This is confirmed many archived copies of the post made from February 3 to 4, 2025.
Hack X
Most reports about the alleged hack of Trump's X page claim that the hackers replaced the photo in the US president's old post. However, if the attackers actually gained access to the account of a politician with a multimillion-dollar audience, then why didn’t they leave new tweets, which would have been a much more effective and visible action? And how would they edit a post almost 14 years ago in this case, if the platform of this doesn't allow?
In reality, there was no talk of any full-fledged hacking of Trump’s page. How explained Mashable tech journalist Matt Binder, unknown people only took advantage of the vulnerability of the service to shorten links Bitly. According to him, crypto scammers were able to intercept several short URLs and link them to their own links. Those, in turn, directed users to the crypto platform website pump.fun (this address is visible at the bottom of the viral screenshot) where newly created tokens (in this case Trump's Meat, which can be translated as "Trump sausage"). The preview of one of these links contained a photo of “naked Trump.” At the same time, Binder showed other allegedly hacked tweets of the current US President and his wife from 2013. So, in his tweet Trump called for readers to follow him on Instagram*, and his wife Melania advertised collection of jewelry. In both cases, they used short URLs from Bitly - in 2025, this led to links to the pump.fun platform in their posts. According to archival copies, in this modified form, tweets have existed since the end of January 2025.
Binder also spoke about what, in his opinion, is Bitly’s vulnerability. When a user creates a short link using the service, it starts with bit.ly/, followed by either a random or a specially specified set of numbers and/or letters by the author (if a certain set is already in use, the platform will inform the user that the address is busy). The journalist suggested that there was a bug in Bitly that allowed previously created addresses to be used if the original link or the account that created the link was deleted or deactivated.
According to archival copies Trump's tweet on April 15, 2011, originally referred to a video on his YouTube channel. “Verified” found something similar in meaning fast for the same date on his Facebook page - there the future US President shared a 33-second video (already unavailable, but there is an archive copy), where he said that he had been on the Hannity show and would perform with speech at a public event.
More on January 30th Bitly service reported, which is aware of a bug that attackers are using to redirect old, inactive links to crypto platforms, and is working to fix it. It was separately clarified that the security service is actively deleting all accounts that abuse the rules, and that the company is not associated with any cryptocurrency projects. Later that day it became knownthat the developers corrected the code, thereby eliminating the vulnerability. The story of Trump's hacked tweets ended when the service blocked the scammers' addresses. Now when I try to navigate through them appears error notification: "This link or QR code has been deactivated."
Photo XXX
As for the viral photo, which supposedly shows Trump naked, its authenticity is still in 2020 checked Reuters agency. Five years ago, Internet users claimed, that the photograph shows how a self-tanner is applied to a naked politician using a spray bottle. Some posts stated that the image was leaked by activists of the Anonymous movement.
Journalists found out that this photo is an art project of a British artist Alison Jackson. According to her website, she explores the cult of celebrity, “an extraordinary phenomenon created by the media, the advertising industry, and famous people themselves.” “Jackson raises questions about how we can no longer tell what is real and what is not, and how we don't care at all. "She creates compellingly realistic photographs, films and sculptures of celebrities going about their private affairs (images we've all imagined but never seen before) using artfully stylized body doubles." it says on the artist's website.
In the Jackson photo gallery there is a section “Mental photos", which contains staged photographs with doubles of politicians, actors, athletes, singers and other celebrities, including, for example, members of the British royal family, Bill Clinton, Vladimir Putin, Marilyn Monroe, David Beckham and Kim Kardashian. Some photos show people without clothes.
The current US president is the subject of many of Jackson's works, but her original photo, which later went viral, had a disclaimer in the lower right corner: “This is not Donald Trump.” Reuters separately clarified that in some viral publications with an incorrect caption, genitals are visible in the picture, which are not visible in the artist’s gallery, and it is unclear whether they were later added by social network users using a photo editor.
In a conversation with Reuters, Jackson said the photo was intended to intrude on Trump's personal life and play on viewers' desire to see other people's private lives. “It's like visual gossip... Our voyeurism is driven by the very nature of photography. She seduces, making us believe in her authenticity, even though we know that this is not true,” the artist added.
The photo was taken in 2016. Behind the scenes video from the photo shoot, including a conversation with the model, was published on Jackson's YouTube channel in November of that year. In the video, the artist says that about 300 people auditioned for the role of Trump and the choice fell on “a teacher, a musician and a completely ordinary guy from the Midwest [USA].” Other photographs from this series can be viewed at material Vanity Fair.
Thus, hackers did not hack Trump's X page and post naked photos of him. In fact, the scammers took advantage of a bug in a third-party service to create short URLs and redirected links from the politician’s old posts to the crypto platform’s website. Moreover, the picture does not depict Trump, but his double, who posed for a photo project by a British artist.
*Russian authorities think Meta Platforms Inc., which owns the social network Instagram, is an extremist organization; its activities and symbols are prohibited in Russia.
Cover photo: social networks / alisonjackson.com
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