A social media influencer who once had 58,000 Twitter followers was convicted by a federal jury of election interference in the 2016 US presidential race over a voter suppression scheme, the US Department of Justice said on Friday.
Douglass Mackey, known online as Ricky Vaughn, was convicted of the charge of conspiracy against rights stemming from a scheme to deprive individuals of their constitutional right to vote, the department said in a statement.
Mackey faces a maximum of 10 years in prison.
Photo: AFP
In 2016, Mackey, 33, established an audience on Twitter with 58,000 followers. An analysis in February 2016 by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Media Lab ranked Mackey as the 107th-most important influencer of the then-upcoming presidential election, in which then-candidate Donald Trump defeated former US secretary of state Hillary Rodham Clinton.
Mackey, a Trump supporter, had been charged in 2021 by federal prosecutors in Brooklyn, who said he conspired with others to disseminate disinformation on social media that urged people to cast their ballots through invalid means such as text messages.
In one Twitter message, for example, he had featured a picture of an black woman standing in front of a sign for an unnamed candidate. Next to the image, it said: “Avoid the line. Vote from home.”
“Today’s verdict proves that the defendant’s fraudulent actions crossed a line into criminality and flatly rejects his cynical attempt to use the constitutional right of free speech as a shield for his scheme to subvert the ballot box and suppress the vote,” US Attorney for the Eastern District of New York Breon Peace said.
Mackey’s lawyer, Andrew Frisch, suggested his client would appeal.
“This case presents an unusual array of appellate issues that are exceptionally strong,” Frisch told the New York Times, adding: “I’m confident about the way forward.”
The Southern Poverty Law Center, a civil rights organization, said Vaughn has openly supported hate groups.
The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) removed former minister of foreign affairs Qin Gang (秦剛) from his post after an investigation concluded that he had conducted an affair and fathered a child while serving as ambassador to the US, the Wall Street Journal reported. Top officials were told in August that a CCP inquiry into Qin uncovered “lifestyle issues,” the newspaper reported yesterday, citing people familiar with the situation that it did not describe. That phrase usually means sexual misbehavior of some type in the parlance of Chinese officialdom. Two of the people said the affair led to the birth of a child in
GUNNED DOWN: The Canadian PM said there were credible allegations that India was connected to the assassination of Hardeep Singh Nijjar in Surrey on June 18 India yesterday dismissed allegations that its government was linked to the killing of a Sikh activist in Canada as “absurd,” expelling a senior Canadian diplomat and accusing Canada of interfering in India’s internal affairs. It came a day after Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau described what he called credible allegations that India was connected to the assassination of Hardeep Singh Nijjar, an advocate of Sikh independence from India who was gunned down on June 18 outside a Sikh cultural center in Surrey, British Columbia, and Canada expelled a top Indian diplomat. “Any involvement of a foreign government in the killing of a
SECURITY: Wang met with the US national security adviser in Malta over the weekend, with the US side noting the importance of peace and stability across the Taiwan Strait Chinese Minister of Foreign Affairs Wang Yi (王毅) yesterday headed to Russia for security talks after two days of meetings with US National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan over the weekend in Malta. China’s top foreign policy official will be in Russia until Thursday for a round of China-Russia strategic security consultations, the Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs said in a brief statement. The US and China are at odds over Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. China has refrained from taking sides in the war, saying that while a country’s territory must be respected, the West needs to consider Russia’s security concerns about NATO’s
LOST BATTLE: The Varroa mite, which Canberra has called the ‘most serious pest’ to face bees, would cause serious economic damage, an ecologist said Australia yesterday abandoned its fight to eradicate the destructive Varroa mite, an invasive parasite responsible for the collapse of honeybee populations across the planet. Desperate to keep Varroa out of the country, authorities have destroyed more than 14,000 infected beehives since the tiny red-brown pest was first detected north of Sydney in June last year. The government said its US$64 million eradication plan could not stop the mite from spreading, and the country’s beekeepers should now prepare to live with the incursion. “The recent spike in new detections have made it clear that the Varroa mite infestation is more widespread and has