Federal prosecutors charged a Florida man with interfering in the 2016 presidential election, saying he conspired to share misinformation on widely followed Twitter accounts in an effort to trick people into not casting legal votes. Justice Department officials said the charge may be the first of its kind.
Douglass Mackey—whose alleged alias, Ricky Vaughn, was behind a highly trafficked alt-right Twitter account—is accused in a federal complaint in Brooklyn of working with others to design and distribute tweets telling people they could vote by texting Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton’s name to a telephone code. Around Election Day 2016, at least 4,900 unique phone numbers texted Mrs. Clinton’s name or some derivative to a number provided by the alleged misinformation campaign, prosecutors said.
The criminal complaint charges Mr. Mackey with one count: conspiring to deprive people of their right to vote. Department of Justice officials described the charge as unusual, and a department spokesman said Mr. Mackey may be the first defendant to be charged with election-interference crimes stemming from social-media posts.
The complaint doesn’t identify Mrs. Clinton by name, referring to her instead as “the Candidate,” but a person familiar with the investigation confirmed it referred to the former senator and secretary of state.
Mr. Mackey, 31 years old, was arrested in Palm Beach on Wednesday and was released on $50,000 bond after an appearance in federal court in Florida. A court-appointed lawyer for Mr. Mackey declined to comment.
The complaint says Mr. Mackey conspired with “known and unknown” unnamed co-conspirators, sharing ideas for the tweets. One of the co-conspirators is Anthime “Tim” Gionet, a far-right online provocateur who uses the pseudonym “Baked Alaska,” the person familiar with the investigation said. Mr. Gionet was arrested earlier this month in connection with the storming of the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6. Neither Mr. Gionet nor his attorney responded to requests for comment.
Prosecutors said Mr. Mackey built a large online following using the Ricky Vaughn alias ahead of the 2016 election. An analysis by a group from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Media Lab deemed the alias among the top 150 influencers of the 2016 election, ranking above the Twitter accounts for some national media outlets.
According to the complaint, in 2016 Mr. Mackey and several co-conspirators got the idea to spread false voting information about the U.S. election from a similar online effort in the U.K. ahead of the Brexit referendum.
One Twitter account, which prosecutors said was Mr. Mackey’s, gained approximately 58,000 followers, the complaint said. Twitter suspended the account about one month before the November election for “participating in targeted abuse,” but prosecutors said Mr. Mackey then used other accounts.
On Nov. 1, 2016, according to the complaint, Mr. Mackey used one of his accounts to tweet an image of a Black woman standing in front of a sign for Mrs. Clinton, with the text: “Avoid the Line. Vote from Home. Text ‘Hillary’ to 59925.”
The next day, according to the complaint, Mr. Mackey tweeted: “Obviously, we can win Pennsylvania. The key is to drive up turnout with non-college whites, and limit black turnout.”
A Twitter spokesman said the company permanently suspended the accounts at issue for violating the platform’s rules. “Consistent with our ongoing relationship and collaboration with law enforcement and government partners, we’ve worked closely with the appropriate authorities on this issue,” the Twitter spokesman said, adding that the platform has taken a number of steps to bolster election-security efforts since the 2016 election.
—Erin Ailworth contributed to this article.
Write to Rebecca Davis O’Brien at [email protected] and Alexa Corse at [email protected]
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