You poor dumb bastard. You don't realize that the
Post# of 123672
Twitter Troll Tricked 4,900 Democrats in Vote-by-Phone Scheme, U.S. Says
Douglass Mackey, a right-wing provocateur, was accused of spreading memes that made Hillary Clinton supporters falsely believe they could cast ballots in 2016 via text message.
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/27/nyregion/d...itter.html
The co-conspirators were not named in the complaint, but one of them was Anthime Gionet, a far-right media personality known as “Baked Alaska,” who was arrested after participating in the Jan. 6 riot at the U.S. Capitol, according to a person briefed on the investigation, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss an ongoing investigation.
As a result of the misinformation campaign, prosecutors said, at least 4,900 unique phone numbers texted the number in a futile effort to cast votes for Mrs. Clinton.
Mr. Mackey was arrested on Wednesday morning in West Palm Beach, Fla., in what appeared to be the first criminal case in the country involving voter suppression through the spread of disinformation on Twitter.
“With Mackey’s arrest, we serve notice that those who would subvert the democratic process in this manner cannot rely on the cloak of internet anonymity to evade responsibility for their crimes,” said Seth DuCharme, the acting United States attorney in Brooklyn, whose office is prosecuting the case.
Mrs. Clinton was not named in the complaint, but a person briefed on the investigation confirmed that she was the presidential candidate described in the charging documents.
The case will test the novel use of federal civil rights laws as a tool to hold people accountable for misinformation campaigns intended to interfere with elections, a problem that has recently become an urgent priority for social media platforms and law enforcement officials to stop.
It has become a game of whack-a-mole to police users like Mr. Mackey, who prosecutors said would simply open new Twitter accounts after his old ones were suspended. Mr. Mackey used four different Twitter accounts from 2014 to 2018, the complaint said, always seeking to hide his true identity from the public.
The goal of Mr. Mackey’s campaign, according to prosecutors, was to influence people to vote in a “legally invalid manner.”