Kieran Neagle, a 17-year-old from London, was scrolling through Twitter last night when he came across an article about Queen Elizabeth saying that she can legally kill Donald Trump.
Soon afterwards, several accounts shared the screenshot of the story, which all gained several thousand retweets.
It was then picked up by parody accounts such as Dory.
A lot of people immediately knew how Trump's state visit would play out.
But as the story began to make the rounds, some seemed to really believe it.
In fact, so many people were convinced the story was real that several of the accounts – like Neagle – later tweeted to clarify that the story was probably fake.
"I just thought people would find it funny just like I did, but quite a lot of people ended up thinking it was real, which was mad," Neagle said.
The article was originally posted on The Daily Mash, a British satirical website.
According to the site's "about" page, articles on The Daily Mash are "all made-up" and "not intended, in any way whatsoever, to be taken as factual".
"We can't be held responsible for other people's stupidity," the editor of The Daily Mash, Paul Stokes, told BuzzFeed News.
Stokes said that while most of the 5 million people who read the article got the joke, some "poor benighted souls can't grasp humour".
He said he believes this may have happened because the article has gone international and reached readers whose first language is not English, adding that he included Americans in that group of people.
"If you think the story is true, you should probably move to an island and don't breed," Stokes said.
British people, meanwhile, got the last laugh.
