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Washington • The day President Donald Trump took office, a National Park Service employee retweeted from the agency's official account side-by-side photos of Trump's smaller inauguration crowd compared with Barack Obama's from 2009.

That didn't go over well with the new Trump administration.

Officials ordered the Park Service and others under the Interior Department umbrella to halt any tweets until further orders.

Since then, scores of unofficial accounts of have been set up, supposedly by rogue government staffers, to tweet out information that wouldn't be popular with the sitting president or his advisers. The social-media outlet, Trump's favorite way to communicate with the public, has also provided a new forum for government whistleblowers.

"We're trying to make sure that there's going to be a public venue for real information about the serious challenges the Bureau of Land Management is facing," said one man who is helping to run the @BLM_Alt unofficial account on Twitter. He spoke to The Salt Lake Tribune anonymously out of fear of retribution because he says he's an employee of the BLM who is not authorized to speak for the agency.

"There's widespread concern about the new administration," he said in an interview by phone, "and likelihood they're going to further restrict public information about natural resources owned by all the American people."

The Tribune could not independently verify the man's identity, and several others contacted also said they were afraid to give their names.

"We're concerned about a witch-hunt mentality," the man said, adding that he believes Trump is thin-skinned.

There are some 80 unofficial accounts and counting, including those for the National Park Service, the Homeland Security and Energy departments, the Environmental Protection Agency and even the White House itself. Each claims to be from insiders and promises to speak out if there are attempts to muzzle science-based information or dubious assertions from the official, sanctioned social-media accounts.

"We consider ourselves strong patriots," said the @BLM_Alt account manager, who described himself as an independent voter and who says the effort isn't partisan. "It's the American way to make sure people are informed about what their government is doing."

While some of the unofficial accounts appear to be innocuous, sending out tweets promoting specific national parks, others are more vocal in their anti-Trump messages.

The @altnatparkser account — which has 74,500 followers and says it's run by nongovernment employees — retweeted Trump's message about "Make America Great Again," by adding, "We're TRYING to! By getting you impeached."

Another account, @rogueSNRadvisor, who proclaims to be a White House senior adviser, said Trump's secretary of education, Betsy DeVos, is jokingly referred to as "DeVoid" in the West Wing.

Those involved in the rogue accounts say they just want to have another path to share information, because they worry the Trump administration will not be as forthcoming.

"A lot of us in the government are scared that we've spent the past eight years of our career working on open data, transparency in science, and being servants to the American public," one person who runs the @InteriorAlt account said in an interview conducted through Twitter's direct-message feature. "Now that seems to be changing dramatically where special interests, who have always had a presence in D.C., are now in control."

That person also spoke anonymously, fearing retribution for his or her job at the Interior Department, and noted others in the department were also tweeting from the unofficial account.

"This isn't really politics," the person said. "I like science because it's independent of whatever you believe. Problem is that the people in charge are skeptical of the overwhelming science in support of basic issues important to Americans. And that's scary as hell when you have people that don't believe in real science."

The Interior Department declined to comment on the unofficial accounts.

Twitter's rules allow for parody accounts as long as the user notes that it is not officially affiliated with the entity it is poking fun at, and that it is "done so in a way that would be understood by the intended audience."

Mock accounts are ubiquitous on the social-media platform. People have parodied Sen. Orrin Hatch and Rep. Rob Bishop on Twitter, for example.

Even Trump missed out on getting his own name as his handle, opting to grab @realDonaldTrump as his username instead. The @DonaldTrump handle has tweeted only once, suggesting users follow the other account.

tburr@sltrib.com,

Twitter: @thomaswburr