A man known as a far-right Twitter troll was arrested on Wednesday and charged with spreading disinformation online that led Democratic voters to vote in 2016 by phone instead of voting.
Prosecutors accused 31-year-old Douglass Mackey of coordinating with co-conspirators to distribute memes on Twitter, falsely claiming that Hillary Clinton’s followers could vote by texting a specific phone number.
As a result of that campaign, prosecutors said, at least 4,900 unique phone numbers sent text messages to cast votes for Ms. Clinton.
Mr. Mackey was arrested Wednesday morning in West Palm Beach, Florida on what appears to be the country’s first criminal case concerning the repression of voters through the spread of disinformation on Twitter. He could not be immediately reached for comment, and an attorney for Mr. Mackey could not be identified immediately.
Ms. Clinton was not named in the complaint, but one person who was informed of the investigation confirmed that she was the presidential candidate described in the indictments.
“With Mackey’s arrest, we are realizing that those who would undermine the democratic process in this way cannot rely on the cloak of internet anonymity to evade responsibility for their crimes,” said Seth DuCharme, incumbent United States Attorney in Brooklyn.
In 2018, it was revealed that Mr. Mackey is the operator of a Twitter account under the pseudonym Ricky Vaughn, which empowered former President Donald J. Trump while spreading anti-Semitic and white nationalist propaganda.
Mr. Mackey’s account had such a large following that it topped the MIT Media Lab’s list of 150 Top Influencers in the 2016 election, ahead of Twitter accounts for NBC News, Drudge Report, and CBS News.
Twitter closed the account in 2016, a month before the election, for violating company rules by “participating in targeted abuse”. At that time, the account had around 58,000 followers.
Mr. Mackey faces an unusual charge: Conspiracy to violate rights, which makes it illegal for people to conspire to “suppress” or intimidate anyone from exercising a constitutional right such as voting.
The indictment provides for a maximum sentence of 10 years in prison.
