Right-wing Twitter poster sentenced to seven months in prison for conspiring to suppress voters
Lying on Twitter is free speech, right? Lying about how to vote as part of a voter suppression scheme is a federal crime that could well land you in prison. A right-wing commentator, Douglass “Ricky Vaughn” Mackey, Jailed for 7 months after mistakenly posting about voting via text message
For example, Mackey tweeted a photo of a woman standing in front of a sign that read “African Americans for Hillary.” “Avoid the queue. Vote from home,” the tweet said. “Text ‘Hillary’ to 59925.”
U.S. Attorney Breon Peace said in a statement that Mackey “weaponized disinformation in a dangerous plan to deter targeted groups, including Black and brown people and women, from participating in our democracy.”
Mackey’s attorney, Andrew Frisch, requested in a memorandum to the judge that his client be spared prison. Frisch said Mackey began psychotherapy in 2018 to turn his life around and is “not the Ricky Vaughn from seven years ago.”
The New York Times Here’s more on where the frozen peaches ended and the hot sauce began: Man who spread misinformation on behalf of Trump sentenced to seven months in prison.
During one trial last springProsecutors presented evidence that the man, Douglass Mackey, had joined private Twitter groups in which participants enjoyed using lies and deception on behalf of Donald J. Trump, committing what one participant described as ” “the profound psyops of the meme war”.
Much of this activity was protected by the First Amendment, prosecutors said. But they argued that Mr. Mackey committed a crime days before the election when, under the name Ricky Vaughn, he posted images aimed at black and Latino voters and claimed it was possible to vote by text message. The idea, prosecutors said, was to suppress votes for Mrs. Clinton.
Mackey’s post is above. At first glance I thought voter suppression was secondary to signaling racism as part of the social media performance/grift/addiction loop, but that’s why we have lawsuits.
It never ceases to amaze me that these guys’ mugshots are never released unless they admonish the damn things. But here he is in a low-quality social media post New York Daily News published without citing the source.
