Vermont native charged with spreading misinformation, impeding right to vote
January 29, 2021 | By Seamus McAvoy | VTDigger.org
Candidates Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton begin the third 2016 presidential debate on Oct. 19, 2016. A pro-Trump activist originally from Waterbury is facing federal charges for conspiring on social media to spread misinformation ahead of that election.
Editor’s note: This story is reposted with permission from VTDigger.org where it was posted originally on Jan. 28, 2021.
Prominent far-right Twitter troll Douglass Mackey, a Vermont native known online as “Ricky Vaughn,” was arrested Wednesday in West Palm Beach, Fla. He was charged with conspiring in a misinformation campaign aimed at Black voters during the 2016 presidential election.
Mackey, 31, faces one federal charge of disseminating information “designed to deprive individuals of their constitutional right to vote,” and could face a sentence for up to 10 years. He appeared in court on Wednesday and was released on a $50,000 bond.
So far, there have been few cases in which federal charges were brought against individuals for actions on social media. Mackey’s case indicates a possible sea change in the way misinformation and election interference on social media are prosecuted.
“There is no place in public discourse for lies and misinformation to defraud citizens of their right to vote,” said Seth D. DuCharme, acting U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of New York, in a statement issued Wednesday.
“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. They will be investigated, caught and prosecuted to the full extent of the law.”
A statement issued by the Department of Justice says Mackey and co-conspirators are accused of disseminating images on social media, primarily Twitter, that encouraged voters to vote for Democrat Hillary Clinton by text — but there’s no provision for counting “votes” sent by text.
A tweet on Nov. 1, 2016, allegedly depicted a Black woman holding a sign that read “African Americans for Hillary,” with the message “Avoid the Line. Vote from Home. Text ‘Hillary’ to 59925.” The image was tweeted with the hashtags #GoHillary and #ImWithHer.
The Department of Justice said nearly 5,000 phone numbers texted the listed number with some version of Clinton’s name around the day of the 2016 presidential election.
“Protecting every American citizen’s right to cast a legitimate vote is a key to the success of our republic,” said William F. Sweeney Jr., assistant director in charge of the FBI’s New York Field Office, in a statement. “What Mackey allegedly did to interfere with this process — by soliciting voters to cast their ballots via text — amounted to nothing short of vote theft. It is illegal behavior and contributes to the erosion of the public’s trust in our electoral processes.”
Before becoming notorious in the white nationalist and so-called “alt-right” online sphere surrounding the candidacy of Donald Trump, Mackey grew up in Waterbury and attended Harwood Union High School.
He attended Middlebury College, graduating with a degree in economics in 2011. Mackey worked as an economist at John Dunham & Associates in New York City and was fired in the summer of 2016.
In the following months, Mackey built a thousands-strong audience on the “Ricky Vaughn” account by tweeting and promoting white supremacist, misogynistic, anti-Semitic and Islamophobic content.
Mackey’s original handle, @ricky_vaughn99, was listed by MIT Media Lab as the 107th most influential personality in the 2016 election — ahead of high-profile accounts like CNN Breaking News, Vox, NBC News and Stephen Colbert.
Twitter shut down Mackey’s first account in October 2016, but a new account claiming to be “Ricky Vaughn 2.0” with the handle “@RapinBill” popped up shortly after. The account was active until April 2018, when HuffPost revealed that Mackey was the person behind the Vaughn accounts.