Substitute while the actions of the article are loading
Supporters of former President Donald Trump have struggled to defend him online in the hours since the commission’s January 6 hearings, trying to cast doubt on his involvement on the same social media channels that had captured clear evidence linking him to the attack. Capitol.
In doing so, they reaffirmed the flawless role that social media played in the 2021 uprising and made it clear that his supporters are determined to remain a major force on the Internet, despite Trump’s ban on major platforms such as Twitter, Facebook and YouTube.
The Trump War Room, a Twitter account once run by his re-election campaign, tweeted, “Trump and the rally have nothing to do with violating the Capitol!”
On the bulletin board Patriots.win, a spin-off of TheDonald.win, where members shared ideas on how to smuggle weapons into Washington before the uprising, a popular topic on Friday called January 6 “the most patriotic thing I’ve ever seen” and said everyone whoever disagrees is an “enemy of the nation.”
And on pro-Trump channels in the Telegram chat service, supporters ridiculed the hearing as too much of a script or a guerrilla circus, if they mentioned it at all.
The outpouring of support for Trump came in response to a hearing that gathered new testimonies with unreleased footage to document both the gravity of the attack on the Capitol and Trump’s role in stimulating it. He also stressed how the social media landscape has changed. changed in the 17 months since Trump was shut down by leading online platforms for his role in inflating violent attempts to overturn the election of Joe Biden as president.
For the most part, Trump and some of his most zealous supporters have been thrown onto smaller platforms as they try to respond.
The change was evident in a video editing shown by the commission on January 6 of the attack, where a rebel is heard shouting Trump’s tweet through a megaphone to urge the crowd to enter the Capitol halls. The tweet Trump sent minutes earlier said that Vice President Mike Pence did not have the courage to “do what needed to be done” and that “the United States demands the truth!”
Trump is aggressively using Twitter to unite his supporters to undo what he falsely called a fraudulent election, tweeting in December 2020, “WE HAVE JUST STARTED FIGHTING !!!” and “A big protest in the District of Columbia on January 6 . Be there, you will be wild! “
The tweets were widely circulated by his fans, and Congressional investigators shared video testimonies of rebels on Thursday who said they saw them as calls for action. On December 13, 2020, a day before the Electoral College planned to seal President Biden’s victory, Virginia Ginny Thomas, the wife of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, sent an email to Arizona lawmakers with links to a YouTube video urging them to “fix things.”
On January 6, 2021, Trump tweeted that the states had voted for FRAUD. … BE STRONG! ”It wasn’t until 2:38 p.m. that he finally called on the crowd on Twitter to” stay peaceful “after the rebels had already violated the Capitol in what a police officer said Thursday looked like a bloody” military scene. “
Later that evening, Trump tweeted: “These are the things and events that happen when a sacred election victory is so unceremoniously and viciously taken away by the great patriots. … Come home with love and peace. Remember this day forever! “Two days later, Twitter and Facebook suspended his account, citing the risk that he would incite more violence.
A Twitter official who spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the issue told The Washington Post on Friday that decision-makers at the company have learned that Trump’s tweets play a role in promoting violence, but at the time it was not known that they were literally read aloud by the rebels.
In Trump’s new Twitter clone, Truth Social, he posted a dozen messages after the hearing, criticizing him for showing “only negative footage” of the brutal siege.
At 6:50 a.m. Friday, Trump called former Attorney General William P. Barr “weak and scared” and dismissed blame for the riot. He also spoke disparagingly of his daughter Ivanka Trump after she was shown in a video of the hearing, saying he believed there was no evidence of fraud that could undo his loss.
“She was not involved in reviewing or studying the election results,” he wrote. “She had long since left.”
Prior to the hearing, Trump wrote – or, in Truth Social jargon, “truth” – that January 6 “was not just a protest, it was the largest movement in our country’s history.” The next morning, he wrote that “the attack was not caused by me, it was caused by rigged and stolen elections!”
But Trump could only shout at the reduced crowd: his Truth Social account has about 3 million followers, or less than 4 percent of the 88 million Twitter followers he had before his ban.
Joan Donovan, research director at the Shorenstein Center for Media, Politics and Public Policy at Harvard, suggested that it would be difficult to exaggerate the importance of Trump’s tweets for the events of January 6. “The power of Trump’s tweets to tell people, like a military general, where to go and keep up the pressure is clear to researchers,” she said. “And it was very clear when he tweeted that he would leave the building and go to peace, that people started listening and really followed his directives.
The response of the platforms in the days after the attack took away much of that power, Donovan said. “Not only was Trump deplatformed,” but thousands of his supporters, and the Parler social network was removed from major app stores. “Trump’s communications infrastructure was destroyed that day. And he failed to reassemble. “
Whether major social networks allow Trump to return could have a profound effect on his ability to reorganize by 2024, Donovan added.
While Facebook and YouTube stopped him indefinitely, leaving open the possibility of his return, Twitter issued a permanent ban, and Twitter spokesman Trenton Kennedy said Friday that the company supports it. However, billionaire Elon Musk, who is in the process of acquiring Twitter, said he would restore Trump.
Some users on Friday claimed that Truth Social, which advertised itself as a haven for free speech to rival what they call Twitter’s censored “culture of revocation”, worked to crush the discussion about the hearing.
Travis Allen, an information security analyst in Kentucky, said his Truth Social account was suspended minutes after he responded to Trump’s account there Thursday night, citing a January 6 hearing.
Alan, who said he was not a Trump fan, said he could not remember exactly what he wrote, but did not think it violated the site’s rules.
I didn’t think the post was even noticeable, he told The Washington Post on Friday. “The pinnacle of hypocrisy is for Truth Social to claim to support ‘freedom of speech’ and then ban consumers from talking about ‘hearings.’
Representatives of the Trump Media & Technology Group, which owns Truth Social, did not respond to requests for comment.
The site on Friday showed some publications critical of Trump, although many others described the congressional inquiry as “fraud.” In February, the site banned an account that mocked former Congressman Devin Nunes (California), who resigned from Congress to become head of Trump, with a salary of $ 750,000 a year.
Prior to the hearing, some influential Trump supporters called on their online followers to ignore him. Conservative radio host Dan Bongino posted on his Truth Social account minutes before the hearing: “Don’t miss the hockey game tonight, it’s a must-see TV!” and called it a “show against Trump” and a “fake.”
After the hearing, Trump’s allies tried to dismiss the commission’s findings – based on 1,000 interviews, 140,000 documents and hours of visual evidence – as biased or erroneous. Ali Alexander, a conservative activist who organized a January 6 Stop theft rally and testified before the commission in December, told Truth Social that the commission used edited videos and fake audio recordings without providing any evidence to support the allegations. “Have you ever seen a video with more fake edits and SPICE? he wrote.
The commission’s video included long series of unprecedented footage from police and Capitol surveillance cameras revealing skirmishes in appalling detail. “It simply came to our notice then. We’re going to get too many fucking people together. … We are devils, “said one officer.
But much of the video also comes from social media, such as Parler, the right-wing social network popular with Trump supporters at the time. In one clip, a man in a crowd surrounding officers steps out of the Capitol, shouting, “We were invited by the President of the United States.”
On January 6, the commission blamed Trump for the “clant” in the US Capitol
Representative Liz Cheney tells Americans why Jan. 6 should terrify them
Do you want to regulate social media? The first amendment may stand in the way.
Truth’s Truth Social is in trouble as financial and technical problems grow
The siege of the Capitol was planned online. Trump supporters are now planning the next one.
A new video released at the January 6 hearing shows a crowd gathering, violence
Add Comment