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FBI Arrests Prolific Racist Twitter Troll 'Ricky Vaughn' For 2016 Election Interference
A notorious alt-right operative, Douglass Mackey, whom HuffPost unmasked in 2018 as Donald Trump’s most influential white nationalist Twitter troll, “Ricky Vaughn,” was arrested in West Palm Beach, Florida, on Wednesday on federal election interference charges related to a disinformation campaign during the 2016 election.
The charges demonstrate federal prosecutors’ newfound focus on the use of Twitter and other social media platforms to undermine elections and suppress the vote.
Mackey allegedly conspired with four unnamed Twitter users to create and disseminate “memes” designed to dupe people, particularly Black and Latinx voters, into casting invalid votes by posting on Facebook or Twitter or sending a text message to a specified text code, according to the recently unsealed federal complaint.
The complaint lists four co-conspirators referred to only by Twitter “user IDs,” a unique string of numbers assigned to each Twitter account. HuffPost can report that one co-conspirator is a prominent alt-right botmaster who goes by “Microchip” and was instrumental in making pro-Trump and anti-Hillary Clinton hashtags and content go viral on Twitter during the 2016 election. A fascist accelerationist who has expressed admiration for Adolf Hitler and Nazism, Microchip claims to have been involved in the early spread of the QAnon conspiracy cult and repeatedly told this reporter that his goal was to destroy the United States.
Another of Mackey’s co-conspirators is Anthime “Baked Alaska” Gionet, a pro-Trump white nationalist who was arrested on Jan. 16 for his involvement in storming the Capitol on Jan. 6. Gionet also participated in the deadly white nationalist “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, in 2017. (A New York Times story reported Wednesday afternoon that Gionet was a co-conspirator, citing a source close to the investigation, and HuffPost can confirm that reporting based on the Twitter ID cited in the...
