Social media

Subterms

    More stories

    • 113 Shares169 Views

      in Elections

      Neera Tanden, Biden’s Budget Nominee, Faces Challenge to Confirmation

      by

      AdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyNeera Tanden, Biden’s Budget Nominee, Faces Challenge to ConfirmationSenator Joe Manchin III said he would oppose President Biden’s nominee to lead the Office of Management and Budget, a move that could scuttle her chances.Neera Tanden would need the support of at least one Republican senator in order to pass confirmation, with the vote of Vice President Kamala Harris needed to break a tie.Credit…Anna Moneymaker for The New York TimesFeb. 19, 2021Updated 8:11 p.m. ETWASHINGTON — Senator Joe Manchin III announced on Friday that he would oppose the nomination of Neera Tanden, President Biden’s pick to lead the Office of Management and Budget, imperiling her prospects for confirmation in an evenly divided Senate.The announcement by Mr. Manchin, Democrat of West Virginia, underscored the fragility of the ambitions of the new Democratic majority in the Senate and the outsize power that any one senator holds over the success of Mr. Biden’s administration and agenda.The fate of the nomination is now in the hands of a party that Ms. Tanden has frequently criticized in the past, particularly moderate Republicans she has previously scorned. Ms. Tanden would need the support of at least one Republican senator in order to to be confirmed, with the vote of Vice President Kamala Harris needed to break a tie.Given Ms. Tanden’s previous litany of critical public statements and posts on Twitter against members of both parties, it is unclear whether such support exists.Mr. Manchin cited statements from Ms. Tanden that were personally directed at Senators Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the Republican leader; Bernie Sanders, the Vermont independent now in charge of the Senate Budget Committee; and other colleagues.“I believe her overtly partisan statements will have a toxic and detrimental impact on the important working relationship between members of Congress and the next director of the Office of Management and Budget,” said Mr. Manchin, who will also cast a decisive vote on Mr. Biden’s $1.9 trillion stimulus plan. “For this reason, I cannot support her nomination. As I have said before, we must take meaningful steps to end the political division and dysfunction that pervades our politics.”Mr. Biden told reporters on Friday that he did not plan to withdraw her nomination.“I think we are going to find the votes and get her confirmed,” he said.Jen Psaki, the White House press secretary, reiterated that position in a statement: “Neera Tanden is an accomplished policy expert who would be an excellent budget director and we look forward to the committee votes next week and to continuing to work toward her confirmation through engagement with both parties.”But the lack of support from Mr. Manchin could be enough to derail the nomination altogether, should Republicans remain united against her selection.Ms. Tanden would be the first woman of color to head the Office of Management and Budget, an agency that is critical to the execution of the administration’s economic and policy agendas. But Mr. Biden’s decision to nominate her even before Democrats won control of the Senate in January stunned several lawmakers and aides on Capitol Hill, given the slim margins in the upper chamber and Ms. Tanden’s prolific venom on social media.The New WashingtonLatest UpdatesUpdated Feb. 19, 2021, 7:17 p.m. ETGeorgia legislators want to restrict voting methods popular among Democrats.Lloyd Austin addressed a viral video about sexual harassment in the Marine Corps.House Budget Committee unveils a 600-page, $1.9 trillion economic relief bill.A senior adviser to Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign, Ms. Tanden had frequently clashed with Mr. Sanders and other prominent liberals long after the conclusion of the primary race that year. Once she was formally nominated to oversee the budget agency, Ms. Tanden deleted more than 1,000 negative tweets, and liberal senators rallied to her defense.But she faced tough questioning from both Republicans and Democrats during her two confirmation hearings this month, with lawmakers from both parties examining her previous tweets and statements and grilling her over the millions of dollars of corporate donations that her think tank, Center for American Progress, received.Republicans spent the first hour of her first hearing before a Senate homeland security committee asking Ms. Tanden to explain her past tweets and why she deleted more than 1,000 shortly after the November election.Senator Rob Portman, Republican of Ohio and a former director of the Office of Management and Budget, read aloud posts in which she called Mr. McConnell “Moscow Mitch” and said that “vampires have more heart than Ted Cruz,” a Republican senator from Texas.Her second hearing was no less fiery, with Mr. Sanders confronting Ms. Tanden over her history of leveling personal attacks on social media. He also demanded details about the donations the Center for American Progress received from corporations under her leadership and a promise that it would not influence her work in the Biden administration.Ms. Tanden apologized to lawmakers during both hearings, saying she regretted many of her previous remarks, and she vowed that the donations would carry no weight over her role as budget director.“I worry less about what Mrs. Tanden did in the past than what she’s going to do in the future,” Mr. Sanders said Friday night on CNN. “I’m talking to her early next week.”Many Democrats accused Republicans of unfairly singling out Ms. Tanden’s social media posts after years of evading queries about President Donald J. Trump’s tweets, even when they espoused racist and offensive commentary or targeted their own colleagues.“Honestly, the hypocrisy is astounding,” Senator Chuck Schumer of New York, the Democratic leader, said at the time. “If Republicans are concerned about criticism on Twitter, their complaints are better directed at President Trump. I fully expect to see some crocodile tears spilled on the other side of the aisle over the president-elect’s cabinet nominees.”Mr. Biden’s pick for deputy director of the agency, Shalanda Young, is respected by lawmakers and aides in both parties after serving as staff director for House Democrats on the Appropriations Committee. The first Black woman to serve in the role, she helped wrangle the compromise that ended the nation’s longest government shutdown in 2019 and the coronavirus relief packages Congress approved in 2020.Jim Tankersley More

    • 113 Shares109 Views

      in Elections

      What Do ‘Right’ and ‘Wrong’ Mean to the G.O.P.?

      by

      AdvertisementContinue reading the main storyOpinionSupported byContinue reading the main storyWhat Do ‘Right’ and ‘Wrong’ Mean to the G.O.P.?These politicians are still bowing to their alpha — Trump.Opinion ColumnistFeb. 10, 2021Credit…Devin Oktar Yalkin for The New York TimesIt cannot be said often enough: The first rule of politics is survival.This is a sad but pervading truth. We like to think that politicians are driven above all else by a sense of public service, a fundamental belief in the efficacy of government and in the defense of democracy.Surely that is true of some. But we are ever reminded that too many elected officials’ primary impulse is the pursuit, acquisition and maintenance of power. Power is the politicians’ profession. So just like a pack of animals, they willingly, gleefully subjugate themselves to the one among them with the most power.We see that playing out before our eyes in the second impeachment trial of Donald Trump for inciting an insurrection, a high crime of which he is clearly guilty.All but six Republican senators voted that the trial itself was unconstitutional, even though constitutional scholars overwhelmingly disagree.These politicians are still bowing to their alpha — Trump. In the early days of Trump’s presidency, Republicans in Congress either cozied up to him or sat in silence as his demagogy ensnared and entranced the Republican base.For years — decades even — the conservative elite had alternately tolerated, recruited or activated racists, white nationalists and white supremacists. The elite have their own versions of these biases, but they thought themselves more erudite and tactical, not brash and brazen. They would use surgical tools of voter suppression, states’ rights campaigns and defense of marriage and the unborn to advance their goals in a way they saw as honorable.But Trump saw the voters that the elites kept under the stairs, the ones they want to excite only around election time. He saw the resentment and rage in them. He saw that their voices had been muted and their tongues chastened.He drew them out. He let them vent. He allowed them to see they were indeed the majority of the party. He offered to be their leader, their white knight of white power, and they accepted. They grew loud and strong and he fed them red meat. They rampaged and he basked in the glow of the blaze.Leader and followers had found each other. Now the traditional Republicans were on the run or on the ropes. Rather than become victims of the mob, they yielded to it. They tried to tap into it. They tried to grab the reins of it.But this mob had only one leader: Trump. It was a cult of personality. It was a religion with one god. And that god is a jealous god. And vindictive. And mean.Anyone who would dare forsake Trump runs the risk of being smote by him, and targeted by his minions. To diverge from Trump is essentially to abdicate power, and for a career politician that is a fate worse than death.So, we watch the impeachment trial, with the impressive and clear presentation by the House impeachment managers of evidence that we already knew and some that we didn’t. We are reminded of just how heinous an episode that attempted insurrection was, that people were killed and injured.We are reminded that there were those in that band of terrorists who wanted to take even more murderous actions, but simply didn’t happen upon the opportunity and targets.And, in the end, you have to ask yourself only one question to convict Trump: Would this attempted insurrection have happened without him? The answer is no.For months Trump lied about the election and pumped into his followers the fallacy that something had been stolen from them and that they needed to fight with all they had to reclaim it. Then there are all the things he said on the eve of the assault on the Capitol, during it and even after it.Trump refused to accept that his white power presidency was coming to an end, in part because of Black and brown voters in some key states, so he asked his white power patriots to come to his defense, to help overturn a fair election.They responded, loyally, to the party leader who had truly seen them, who didn’t condemn their bigotries but amplified them. They saw themselves in Trump, and they still do.The Republicans in Congress are still afraid of their own base, their own constituencies in their own districts and states, because the Trump rot reaches down to the root. Their voters belong to Trump, therefore their futures are in Trump’s hands.Trump is essentially running a defection minority government from political exile.Republicans dare not cross him, even if they know that he is wrong, even if they know that what he did to incite the insurgency is wrong, even if they know that voting to convict him is right.Right and wrong have taken on new meanings in this Republican Party: to be right is to side with Trump, unwaveringly, while the only wrong is to do the opposite.The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook and Twitter (@NYTopinion), and Instagram.AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

    • 213 Shares99 Views

      in US Politics

      To restore trust in democracy, the US should lead a global 'fact fightback' | Timothy Garton Ash

      by

      To survive, democracy needs a minimum of shared truth. With the storming of the Capitol in Washington on 6 January, the US showed us just how dangerous it is when millions of citizens are led to deny an important, carefully verified fact – namely, who won the election.
      To prosper, democracy needs a certain kind of public sphere, one in which citizens and their representatives engage in vigorous argument on the basis of shared facts. Restoring that kind of public sphere is now a central task for the renewal of liberal democracy. Call it the fact fightback.
      The basic idea comes to us from the very beginnings of democracy, 2,500 years ago. The citizens of ancient Athens gathered in an open air debating place known as the Pnyx – the original “public square”. “Who will address the assembly?” asked the herald, and any citizen could get up on a stone platform to speak. After facts and arguments had been presented and debated, a policy was put to a vote. It was through this deliberative process that the ancient Athenians decided to fight the invading Persians at sea, in the Battle of Salamis, and saved the world’s first democracy.
      To be sure, ancient Athens never entirely measured up to its own revolutionary ideal of equal, free speech for the public good; nor did the US “public square”, even before the arrival of Fox News and Facebook. Beware the myth of a pre-Zuckerberg golden age, when only the purest waters of Truth flowed from the mouths of supremely principled newspapermen, and all citizens were rational, informed and respectfully open-minded. But most democracies have in recent years moved further away from the Athenian ideal: some rapidly (the US, Poland), others more slowly (Germany, Britain).
      To address this challenge, we need a twin-track strategy. On the first track, individual democracies must tackle the particular problems of their own national information environments. In Britain, for example, the battle to defend and improve the BBC is more important than anything the UK government does about Facebook or Twitter.
      A public service broadcaster such as the BBC gives us not just verified facts but a curated diversity of arguments in one place: a digital Pnyx. Any democracy that has a decent public service broadcaster should double its budget, strengthen its independence from government and task it with enhancing the digital public square for tomorrow’s citizens.
      In Poland, where public service broadcasting has been destroyed by a populist ruling party, it is now crucial to defend independent private media such as the TVN television channel and the onet.pl internet platform. They and others are coming under sharp attack, with measures straight out of the playbook of Viktor Orbán in Hungary.
      In the US there is no shortage of diverse, free, privately owned media, including some of the best in the world. The problem there is that Americans have largely separated out into two divorced media worlds – with different television channels, radio stations, YouTube channels, Facebook pages and Twitter feeds (such as the currently deleted @realDonaldTrump) giving them incompatible versions of reality.
      It is as if half the citizens of ancient Athens had assembled on the old Pnyx, where they were addressed by Pericles, while the other half gathered on a counter-Pnyx, where the would-be tyrant Hippias (Donald J) held them enthralled. How do you bring Americans back together so they listen to each other again?
      Yet no single nation is big enough to take on the private superpowers of the digital world – Facebook, Google, Amazon, Twitter, Apple, Netflix. Here, on this second track, we need the co-ordinated action of a critical mass of democracies, starting with the US and those of the European Union.
      Outside China, the US is the world’s leading digital trendsetter while the EU is its leading norm-setter. Put together the trendsetter and the norm-setter, add a bunch of other leading democracies, and you have a combination of market and regulatory power to which even His Digital Highness Mark Zuckerberg must bow.
      When I hear politicians confidently pontificating about Facebook or Google, I am reminded of HL Mencken’s remark: “For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple and wrong.” Make them pay for news links on their platforms! (The Australian solution.) Put the former Daily Mail editor Paul Dacre on to them as head of the UK media regulator Ofcom! Treat platforms as publishers!
      The US’s giant for-profit platforms are neither “dumb pipes” nor publishers, but a new creation somewhere in-between. They are algorithmic selectors, distributors and promoters of content provided by others and, at the same time, mass collectors and commercial exploiters of our data.
      At best, they are important aids to truth-seeking. (We Google the sharpest criticism of Google.) At worst, they are unprecedentedly powerful amplifiers of lies. The profit motive pushes them towards the dark side, via algorithmic maximisation of the currency of attention. In a 2016 internal report, Facebook itself found that 64% of those who joined one extremist group on Facebook did so only because the company’s algorithm recommended it to them. (“We’ve changed, you know!” protests Facebook, like a reformed alcoholic. But has he really stopped drinking?)
      What we need now is a process, led by the US and EU, to distil some coherent policies from what is already a large body of good research. Some, such as amending the US Communications Decency Act to make platforms more directly responsible for curbing harmful content, will depend on the new US Congress. Others, such as breaking what are clearly monopolies or near-monopolies, will require a strategic combination of EU competition policy and revised US anti-trust legislation.
      For content moderation, we should build on the hybrid regulation model pioneered in Facebook’s new oversight board, which has just issued its first rulings. (Next challenge: should Facebook, and by implication Twitter, continue to ban ex-president Trump?) Serious solutions will involve technological innovation, business practice, fact-checking and digital education, as well as democratically mandated law and regulation.
      Ideally, this would result in a set of proposals being put before the “summit of democracies” planned by the US president, Joe Biden. Of course, 80 different countries are not going to adopt identical measures. But there must be some coherence in the underlying principles and basic approaches, otherwise the internet of the free, which has already lost China, will become even more of a splinternet. Moreover, the private superpowers will be the only ones who can afford the cost of complying with 80 different sets of regulations, thus unintentionally strengthening the fateful trend to monopoly. Since these are US companies, a special responsibility falls on Washington. Here is a unique opportunity for Biden’s US to show that it can listen as well as lead.
      Timothy Garton Ash is the author of Free Speech: Ten Principles for a Connected World More

    • 100 Shares109 Views

      in Elections

      Marjorie Taylor Greene Knows Exactly What She’s Doing

      by

      AdvertisementContinue reading the main storyOpinionSupported byContinue reading the main storyMarjorie Taylor Greene Knows Exactly What She’s DoingThe once-porous border between the right and the far right has dissolved.Feb. 5, 2021, 5:27 a.m. ETMarjorie Taylor Greene during the playing of the national anthem at a Second Amendment rally in Georgia on Sept. 19, 2020. Credit…C.B. Schmelter/Chattanooga Times Free Press, via Associated PressMarjorie Taylor Greene is the QAnon congresswoman, a far-right influencer and gun fanatic who dabbles in anti-Semitism and anti-Muslim bigotry. She endorsed violence against congressional leaders, claimed that the Parkland and Sandy Hook shootings were faked and once shared an anti-refugee video in which a Holocaust denier says that “Zionist supremacists have schemed to promote immigration and miscegenation.”She showed a little contrition on Wednesday with a qualified apology to her Republican colleagues. For this, she received a standing ovation. On Thursday, after an afternoon of deliberation, the House of Representatives voted to strip Greene of her committee assignments. Or rather, Democrats voted to strip her of her committee assignments. All but 11 Republicans voted in her favor.Although it is tempting to make this episode another parable exemplifying the “Trumpification” of the Republican Party, it’s better understood as yet another chapter in an ongoing story: the two-step between the far right and the Republican Party and the degree to which the former is never actually that far from the latter.There’s a story conservatives tell about themselves and their movement. It goes like this: In the mid-1960s, William F. Buckley Jr., the founder of National Review, made a decisive break with the John Birch Society, an ultra-right-wing advocacy organization whose popular co-founder, Robert Welch, believed that the United States was threatened by a far-reaching “Communist conspiracy” whose agents included former President Dwight Eisenhower and Chief Justice Earl Warren.“How can the John Birch Society be an effective political instrument while it is led by a man whose views on current affairs are, at so many critical points, so critically different from their own, and, for that matter, so far removed from common sense?” Buckley asked of Welch in a blistering 1962 essay. “There are, as we say, great things that need doing, the winning of a national election, the re-education of the governing class. John Birch chapters can do much to forward these aims, but only as they dissipate the fog of confusion that issues from Mr. Welch’s smoking typewriter.”This attack on Welch, if not the John Birch Society itself, continued into the 1964 presidential election. Birchers helped carry Senator Barry Goldwater of Arizona to victory in the Republican primary with skillful moves on the convention floor, in what would be their greatest display of strength before a final repudiation from Buckley and other leading lights of the conservative movement the following year. “I am not a member” of the group, Ronald Reagan declared in September 1965, “I have no intention of becoming a member. I am not going to solicit their support.”With this, Welch and the John Birch Society were pushed to the fringe. The conservative movement would win elections and power with an appeal to the mainstream of American society.Or so goes the story.Welch and the John Birch Society were pushed to the margins. The extremist tag, as Lisa McGirr notes in “Suburban Warriors: The Origins of the New American Right,” did real damage to the organization’s ability to sustain itself: “The society was simply too strongly identified with minoritarian utterances and outdated conspiracies to remain an important vehicle for channeling the new majoritarian conservatism.” However, she continues, “The sentiments, grievances, and ideas the organization helped to define mobilize lived on and were championed by organizations and political leaders who thrust forth a new populist conservatism.”A campaign button for Barry Goldwater’s 1964 presidential bid quotes from his speech accepting the Republican nomination.Credit…David J. & Janice L. Frent/Corbis, via Getty ImagesThe hard right wasn’t at the front of the charge, but it wasn’t purged either. Instead, it served as part of the mass base of activists and voters who propelled conservative leaders to prominence and conservative politicians to victory. If there were boundaries between the mainstream and the extreme right, they were — as Daniel Schlozman and Sam Rosenfeld argue in “The Long New Right and the World It Made” — “porous,” with movement from one to the other and back again. Several key figures of the New Right and the Christian Right of the 1970s and ’80s were, Sara Diamond points out in “Roads to Dominion: Right-Wing Movements and Political Power in the United States,” “veterans of the 1964 Goldwater campaign” who were “steeped in the conservative movement’s dual strategy of forming wide-ranging political organizations and activism based on more specific issues.”To illustrate their point about the porousness of the conservative movement, Schlozman and Rosenfeld highlight a series of interviews in which a “who’s who of the right of the late 1970s and early 1980s” sat for wide-ranging discussions with The Review of the News, a front publication of the John Birch Society. Figures from inside the Reagan administration, like Jeane Kirkpatrick and Anne Gorsuch (mother of Neil), then the administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency, made an appearance, as did lawmakers like Jesse Helms of North Carolina, Dick Cheney of Wyoming and Chuck Grassley of Iowa.This is a column, and I may be flattening some of the nuances here for the sake of brevity. But the essential point is sound: Extremism has always had a place in mainstream conservative politics, and this is especially true at the grass-roots level.What’s distinctive right now isn’t the fact that someone like Greene exists but that no one has emerged to play the role of Buckley. A longtime Republican leader like Mitch McConnell can try — he denounced Greene’s “loony lies and conspiracy theories” as a “cancer” on the party — but after he served four years as an ally to Donald Trump, his words aren’t worth much.Those once-porous borders, in other words, now appear to be nonexistent, and there’s no one in the Republican Party or its intellectual orbit to police the extreme right. Representative Greene is the first QAnon member of Congress, but she won’t be the last and she may not even ultimately be the worst.The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram.AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

    • 150 Shares109 Views

      in US Politics

      Claim of anti-conservative bias by social media firms is baseless, report finds

      by

      Republicans including Donald Trump have raged against Twitter and Facebook in recent months, alleging anti-conservative bias, censorship and a silencing of free speech. According to a new report from New York University, none of that is true.Disinformation expert Paul Barrett and researcher J Grant Sims found that far from suppressing conservatives, social media platforms have, through algorithms, amplified rightwing voices, “often affording conservatives greater reach than liberal or nonpartisan content creators”.Barrett and Sims’s report comes as Republicans up their campaign against social media companies. Conservatives have long complained that platforms such as Twitter, Facebook and YouTube show bias against the right, laments which intensified when Trump was banned from all three platforms for inciting the attack on the US Capitol which left five people dead.The NYU study, released by the Stern Center for Business and Human Rights, found that a claim of anti-conservative bias “is itself a form of disinformation: a falsehood with no reliable evidence to support it”.“There is no evidence to support the claim that the major social media companies are suppressing, censoring or otherwise discriminating against conservatives on their platforms,” Barrett said. “In fact, it is often conservatives who gain the most in terms of engagement and online attention, thanks to the platforms’ systems of algorithmic promotion of content.”The report found that Twitter, Facebook and other companies did not show bias when deleting incendiary tweets around the Capitol attack, as some on the right have claimed.Prominent conservatives including Ted Cruz, the Texas senator, have sought to crack down on big tech companies as they claim to be victims of suppression – which Barrett and Sims found does not exist.The researchers did outline problems social media companies face when accused of bias, and recommended a series of measures.“What is needed is a robust reform agenda that addresses the very real problems of social media content regulation as it currently exists,” Barrett said. “Only by moving forward from these false claims can we begin to pursue that agenda in earnest.”A 2020 study by the Pew Research Center reported that a majority of Americans believe social media companies censor political views. Pew found that 90% of Republicans believed views were being censored, and 69% of Republicans or people who leant Republican believed social media companies “generally support the views of liberals over conservatives”.Republicans including Trump have pushed to repeal section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, which protects social media companies from legal liability, claiming it allows platforms to suppress conservative voices.The NYU report suggests section 230 should be amended, with companies persuaded to “accept a range of new responsibilities related to policing content”, or risk losing liability protections. More

    • 125 Shares119 Views

      in Elections

      Twitter Troll Tricked 4,900 Democrats in Vote-by-Phone Scheme, U.S. Says

      by

      AdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyTwitter Troll Tricked 4,900 Democrats in Vote-by-Phone Scheme, U.S. SaysDouglass 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.Douglass Mackey was arrested on Wednesday in what appeared to be the first criminal case in the country involving voter suppression through the spread of disinformation on Twitter.Credit…Andrew Seng for The New York TimesJan. 27, 2021Updated 4:46 p.m. ETA man who was known as a far-right Twitter troll was arrested on Wednesday and charged with spreading disinformation online that tricked Democratic voters in 2016 into trying to cast their ballots by phone instead of going to the polls.Federal prosecutors accused Douglass Mackey, 31, of coordinating with co-conspirators to spread memes on Twitter falsely claiming that Hillary Clinton’s supporters could vote by sending a text message to a specific phone number.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.A lawyer for Mr. Mackey declined to comment.Mr. Mackey, who was released from custody on Wednesday on a $50,000 bond, faces an unusual charge: conspiracy to violate rights, which makes it illegal for people to conspire to “oppress” or “intimidate” anyone from exercising a constitutional right, such as voting. The charge carries a maximum sentence of 10 years in prison.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.”In 2018, Mr. Mackey was revealed to be the operator of a Twitter account using the pseudonym Ricky Vaughn, which boosted former President Donald J. Trump while spreading anti-Semitic and white nationalist propaganda.Mr. Mackey’s account had such a large following that it made the M.I.T. Media Lab’s list of the top 150 influencers in the 2016 election, ranking ahead of the Twitter accounts for NBC News, Drudge Report and CBS News.Twitter shut down the account in 2016, one month before the election, for violating the company’s rules by “participating in targeted abuse.” At that time, the account had about 58,000 followers. Three days later, an associate of Mr. Mackey’s opened a new account for him, prosecutors said, which was also quickly suspended.It was not clear how Mr. Mackey became connected to Mr. Gionet, or “Baked Alaska,” who was also a popular social media figure among white nationalists and far-right activists. A lawyer for Mr. Gionet declined to comment.Mr. Mackey is a Vermont native who graduated from Middlebury College. He worked for five years as an economist at a Brooklyn-based research firm, John Dunham & Associates, until his termination in the summer of 2016, a company representative said.The complaint showed a surgical precision in the disinformation campaign by Mr. Mackey and his four co-conspirators. In private group conversations on Twitter, they discussed how to insert their memes into trending conversations online, and dissected changes in wording and colors to make their messages more effective.Mr. Mackey was obsessed with his posts going viral, the complaint said, once telling his associates, “THE MEMES ARE SPREADING.” He and his co-conspirators joked about tricking “dopey” liberals.Their effort to misinform voters began after the group saw a similar campaign intended to deceive voters in the 2016 referendum in Britain on whether to leave the European Union, also known as Brexit, according to the complaint.Mr. Mackey and his associates created their own version, sharing photos that urged Mrs. Clinton’s supporters to vote for her on Election Day using a hashtag on Twitter or Facebook. To make the images look more legitimate, they affixed the logo of her campaign and linked to her website.Some of their memes appeared to target Black and Latino voters. One image had a Black woman standing in front of a sign supporting Mrs. Clinton, telling people to vote for Mrs. Clinton by texting a specific number. Mr. Mackey shared a similar image written in Spanish, prosecutors said.Less than a week before Election Day, the complaint said, Mr. Mackey sent a message on Twitter: “Obviously, we can win Pennsylvania. The key is to drive up turnout with non-college whites, and limit black turnout.”Around that time, Twitter began removing the images with false information and suspended Mr. Mackey’s account. But the memes had already taken on a life of their own, prosecutors said, as his associates continued to share them with a wider audience.Alan Feuer contributed reporting.AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

    • 163 Shares169 Views

      in US Politics

      Chinese bots had key role in debunked ballot video shared by Eric Trump

      by

      A Chinese bot network played a key role in spreading disinformation during and after the US election, including a debunked video of “ballot burning” shared by Eric Trump, a new study reveals.The misleading video shows a man filming himself on Virginia Beach, allegedly burning votes cast for Donald Trump. The ballots were actually samples. The clip went viral after Trump’s son Eric posted it a day later on his official Twitter page, where it got more than 1.2m views.The video was believed to have originated from an account associated with the QAnon conspiracy theory. But the study by Cardiff University found two China-linked accounts had shared the video before this. Twitter has since suspended one of them.The same Chinese network has spread anti-US propaganda, including calls for violence in the run-up to the 6 January storming of the US Capitol building by a pro-Trump mob. Afterwards. It compared the west’s response to the DC riot to political protests in Hong Kong.The accounts previously posted hostile messages about Trump and Joe Biden, made allegations of election fraud and promoted “negative narratives” about the US response to the coronavirus pandemic.Professor Martin Innes, director of Cardiff University’s crime and security institute, said open-source analysis strongly suggested “multiple links” to Beijing.Researchers initially thought the hidden network was not especially complex, he said. Further evidence, however, revealed what he called a “sophisticated and disciplined” online operation. Accounts did not use certain hashtags in an apparent attempt to avoid Twitter’s counter-measures. They posted during regular Chinese working hours, with gaps on a national holiday, and used machine tools to translate into English.“The network appears designed to run as a series of almost autonomous ‘cells’, with minimal links connecting them,” Innes said. “This structure is designed to protect the network as a whole if one ‘cell’ is discovered, which suggests a degree of planning and forethought.“Therefore, this marks the network as a significant attempt to influence the trajectory of US politics by foreign actors.”Efforts by Russian-linked social media actors to influence US elections are well known. The special counsel Robert Mueller detailed an extensive troll operation run out of building in St Petersburg. Its goal was to “disparage” Hillary Clinton and to promulgate “divisive” content, Mueller found.The Chinese accounts cannot be definitely linked to the state. But ordinary Chinese citizens do not have access to Twitter and it appears that Beijing may be seeking to emulate Kremlin practices by setting up its own US-facing political influence operation.Last year the university’s research team uncovered more than 400 accounts engaging in suspicious activities. These were forwarded to Twitter, which suspended them within a few days. The latest analysis suggests further accounts are still working, with the network more resilient than previously thought.There is compelling evidence of links to China. Posts feature the Chinese language and a focus upon topics reflecting Chinese geopolitical interests. Some 221 accounts spread content in favour of the Chinese Communist party, encompassing some 42,618 tweets, the study found.The accounts also attacked Trump for referring to Covid-19 as the China virus. One claimed the virus originated outside China and had actually come from the US laboratory at Fort Detrick, in Frederick, Maryland. The network’s main goal was “encouragement of discord” in the US, the study concluded. Most tweets about Trump were negative. The handful that were positive urged Americans to “fetch their guns”, to “fight for democracy” and to “call gunmen together” in order to win a second Trump term.The bots complained of “double standards” after the Capitol building riot, saying US politicians had hypocritically backed protesters who entered the Hong Kong legislative building. “The riots in Congress are a disgrace to the United States today, and will soon become the fuse of the American order,” one remarked. More