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Proponents of her case have been working to make the actual transcript of this statement available online. that they had gathered clear evidence linking him to the assault on the Capitol.
In doing so, they reinforced the unmistakable role that social media played in the 2021 uprising and made it clear that their supporters are determined to remain a major force on the Internet, despite Trump’s ban on major platforms. such as Twitter, Facebook and YouTube.
Trump War Room, a Twitter account previously run by his re-election campaign, tweeted, “Trump and the demonstration had nothing to do with the Capitol’s failure!”, Challenging the House committee’s effort to attribute responsibility for the riots directly to Trump.
On the Patriots.win message board, a spin-off of TheDonald.win, where members had shared ideas on how to cast weapons in Washington before the riots, a popular thread on Friday, January 6 called “the most patriotic thing I’ve ever seen May “. and he said that anyone who disagrees is “an enemy of the nation.”
And on the pro-Trump channels of the chat service Telegram, fans ridiculed the audience as an overwritten script or a partisan circus, if they mentioned it.
Trump’s strong support was in response to a hearing that gathered new witnesses with unpublished images to document both the seriousness of the attack on the Capitol and Trump’s role in stimulating it. He also highlighted how the social media landscape has changed in the 17 months since Trump was suspended from major online platforms for his role in fueling violent attempts to revoke the election of Joe Biden as the president.
For the most part, Trump and some of his most ardent advocates were relegated to smaller platforms as they tried to respond.
The change was evident in the video montage that the Jan. 6 committee showed about the attack, where a rioter could be heard shouting a Trump tweet through a megaphone to urge the crowd to enter the Capitol halls. The tweet, which Trump had sent minutes earlier, said that Vice President “Mike Pence didn’t have the courage to do what should have been done” and that “the United States is demanding the truth!”
Trump had used Twitter aggressively to rally his supporters to overturn what he falsely called a fraudulent election, tweeting in December 2020, “We just started fighting !!!” and “Great protest in DC on January 6. Be there, it will be wild!”
These tweets were widely shared by his fans, and on Thursday congressional investigators shared the video testimony of the mutineers who said they saw them as a call to action. On December 13, 2020, the day before the polling station planned to seal President Biden’s victory, Virginia “Ginni” Thomas, the wife of Supreme Court Judge Clarence Thomas, sent an email to lawmakers. the state of Arizona with links to a YouTube video, urging them to “get it right.”
On January 6, 2021, Trump tweeted that states had “voted a FRAUD.… BE STRONG!” It wasn’t until 2:38 p.m. that he finally urged the crowd via Twitter to “stay at peace,” after the rioters had already broken into the Capitol in what a police officer said Thursday. it looked like a bloody “war scene.”
Later that night, Trump tweeted, “These are the things and events that happen when a sacred election victory is so unceremoniously and brutally stripped of great patriots.… Return home with love and peace. Remember this day forever!” Two days later, Twitter and Facebook suspended his account, alleging the risk of further violence.
A Twitter official, speaking on condition of anonymity because they were not allowed to discuss the issue, told The Washington Post on Friday that the company’s decision-makers had understood that Trump’s tweets played a role. to encourage violence, but they had not known at the time that the mutineers were literally reading them aloud.
Trump’s incipient Twitter clone, Social Truth, posted a dozen posts after the hearing, criticizing him for showing “only negative images” of the brutal siege.
As of 6:50 a.m. Friday, Trump called Attorney General William P. Barr “weak and frightened” and dismissed the blame for the riots. He also spoke contemptuously of his daughter Ivanka Trump, after she appeared on video in the audience saying she believed there was no evidence of fraud that could nullify her loss.
She “was not involved in looking at or studying the election results,” she wrote. “I’ve been looking at it for a long time.”
Before the hearing, Trump wrote – or, in the language of Social Truth, “truth” – that January 6 “was not just a protest, it represented the largest movement in the history of our country.” . The next day, he wrote that the assault “was not caused by me, but by a manipulated and stolen choice!”
But Trump was only able to appeal to a small crowd: his Social Truth account has about 3 million followers, or less than 4% of the 88 million Twitter followers he had before his ban.
Joan Donovan, director of research at Harvard’s Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy, suggested that it would be difficult to overstate the importance of Trump’s tweets for the January 6 events. a military general, the investigators were clear on where to go and to keep up the pressure, “he said.” And it was very clear when he tweeted about leaving the building and going in peace that people started listening and followed the its guidelines “.
The response of the platforms in the days following the attack drew much of that power, Donovan said. “It wasn’t just Trump who went awry,” but thousands of his followers and the social network Parler were removed from major app stores. “Trump’s messaging infrastructure broke down that day. And it couldn’t be reassembled.”
If major social media allows Trump to return could have a profound effect on his ability to reorganize for a career in 2024, Donovan added.
While Facebook and YouTube suspended him indefinitely, leaving open the possibility that he could return, Twitter issued a permanent ban, and Twitter spokesman Trenton Kennedy said Friday that the company maintains it. However, billionaire Elon Musk, who is in the process of acquiring Twitter, has said he would reinstate Trump.
On Friday, some users argued that Social Truth, which has been touted as a sanctuary of free speech to compete with what they call Twitter’s censoring “culture of cancellation,” had worked to crush the discussion. audience.
Travis Allen, an information security analyst in Kentucky, said his Social Truth account was suspended minutes after he responded to Trump’s account Thursday night with a reference to the Jan. 6 hearing. .
Allen, who said he was not a fan of Trump, said he did not specifically remember what he wrote, but did not think it violated the rules of the site.
Nor “I think the post was remarkable,” he told The Washington Post on Friday. “It’s the height of hypocrisy that Social Truth claims to support ‘free speech’ and then ban users from talking” about audiences.
Representatives of Trump Media & Technology Group, owner of Truth Social, did not respond to requests for comment.
The site on Friday showed some critical posts with Trump, though many others viewed the congressional investigation as a “deception.” In February, the site banned a mocking account of former Congressman Devin Nunes (R-Calif.), Who resigned from Congress to become head of the Trump company, with a salary of $ 750,000 a year. .
Prior to the hearing, some pro-Trump influencers urged their online followers to ignore it. Conservative radio presenter Dan Bongino posted on his Social Truth account a few minutes before the hearing began: “Don’t miss tonight’s hockey game, it’s a must-see TV!” This online attitude coincided with his cable counterparts on Fox News, who showed little of the audience and called it an “anti-Trump trial” and a “farce.”
After the hearing, Trump’s allies tried to dismiss the committee’s findings, based on 1,000 interviews, 140,000 documents and hours of visual evidence, as biased or flawed. Ali Alexander, a Conservative activist who staged a “Stop the Steal” rally on January 6 and testified before the committee in December, told Social Truth that the committee had used edited videos and fake audio, without giving any evidence for support. raise these claims. “Have you ever seen a video with more fake edits and SPLICES?” He wrote.
The committee’s video featured long series of unreleased footage of police corps cameras and Capitol surveillance cameras revealing fights with gruesome details. “We can’t stand this. We’re going to get too many people.… We’re fucked,” one official said.
But much of the video also came from social media, such as Parler, the popular right-wing social network then popular among Trump supporters. In a clip, a man in the crowd surrounding the officers walks past the Capitol shouting, “The President of the United States invited us.”
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