Trump's Tweeting Isn't Crazy. It's Strategic, Typos and All.
A network of right-wing operatives and activists — and the president himself — spread disinformation about Joe Biden with one simple hashtag.
In the morning hours of Oct. 30, as most of the country slept, President Trump was binge tweeting again.
At 2:32 a.m., he told his 87.3 million Twitter followers: “Way ahead in Texas! Watch the Great Red Wave!”
Minutes later, he tweeted the hashtag #BidenCrimeFamiily, with a typo in the word “family.” That was it. No context, no link.
#BidenCrimeFamily is part of a yearlong, effective disinformation campaign against Joe Biden. In the final days of the presidential race, the hashtag was used on Twitter and Facebook, as well as the darker parts of the web, including 4chan and Parler. It was repeated in the right-wing media ecosystem, like Steve Bannon’s podcast and The Gateway Pundit.
In the last month, on Facebook alone, it reached at least 277,000 people, according to CrowdTangle — and that’s only on non-private pages. Without the hashtag, the slogan has had more than a million public interactions this month on Facebook.
On Wednesday afternoon, with the presidential race unresolved, a protester in Nevada interrupted an election official’s news conference by yelling, “The Biden crime family is stealing the election!”
#BidenCrimeFamily, and the typo, is a crash course in how to rally supporters around a conspiracy theory — while neutering the attempts of social media companies to stop it. Mr. Trump has used this same tactic to sow doubt about mail-in ballots and the integrity of the election.
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/11/05/opinion/trump-twitter-biden-misinformation.html
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