Thousands of social media posts have misleadingly blamed US president Joe Biden and his administration for not only mishandling the temporary shutdown of America’s largest fuel pipeline last Friday, but engineering it. One graphic called the east coast fuel supply crunch, triggered by the Colonial Pipeline cyber attack, “Biden’s Gas Crisis”. Another tweet speculated that petrol stations were running dry as a result of an “INSIDE JOB”, with a meme depicting the president and vice president cheering about the “Green New Deal” in front of a queue at a fuel station. In reality, a ransom-seeking cyber attack, not a Biden executive order or energy policy, triggered the shutdown that drove residents of states such as North Carolina to panic-buy so much petrol that nearly 70% of service stations in the state remained without fuel on Thursday afternoon.