YOU know we're living in strange times when a totally fabricated tweet by the leader of the free world goes viral within minutes.

Twitter user Shaun Usher, who owns a blog called "Letters of Note", photoshopped and posted a Donald Trump tweet after Dow Jones industrials experienced its largest single-day point drop.

The tweet, which Usher dated in February 2015, appears to show Mr Trump stating that any president presiding over such a crash should be "loaded into a very big cannon" and "shot into the sun".

Usher's post immediately went viral, clocking up over 7000 retweets in less than two hours.

But the tweet's lack of authenticity clearly went over several people's heads.

Fifteen minutes and thousands of retweets later, Usher decided to clarify that the tweet was made up.

He went on to humorously express shock that anyone could take his joke seriously.

Usher was eventually contacted by Snopes, a prominent online fact-checking website, which debunked the article.

"Naively thought it too ridiculous to be believable," he told the site in a message. "Says a lot, really. Was going to delete it but it was everywhere within minutes - feels like I need to leave it up in its place of birth."

To be fair, Usher's gag had the president's tweeting style down-pat: an eccentric statement, Randomly Capitalised Words and exclamation marks used in succession.

Let's not forget this much-discussed gem from last month:

The moral of the story is don't trust everything you read on the internet.