Supporters of former President Donald Trump tried to defend him online hours after the committee’s hearings began on January 6, seeking to cast doubt on his involvement through the same social media channels that attack on the Capitol. In doing so, they reinforced the undeniable role that social media played in the 2021 uprising and made it clear that his supporters are determined to remain a major online force, despite Trump banning it from major platforms such as Twitter, Facebook and YouTube. The Trump War Room, a Twitter account once run by his re-election campaign, wrote on Twitter, “Trump and the rally had nothing to do with the Capitol breach!” responsibility for the uprising purely to Trump. In the Patriots.win message board – a spinoff of TheDonald.win, where members shared ideas on how to get covert weapons into Washington before the uprising – a popular thread called Friday, January 6, “the most patriotic thing I’ve ever seen.” never”. and said that whoever disagrees is “the enemy of the nation.” And on Trump pro-Telegram channels, supporters ridiculed the hearing as too scripted or partisan, if at all. The outburst of support for Trump came in response to a hearing that gathered new testimonies with previously unpublished footage to document both the seriousness of the Capitol attack and Trump’s role in pushing it. He also highlighted how the social media landscape has changed in the 17 months since Trump was suspended from leading online platforms for his role in stepping up violent efforts to overthrow Joe Biden as president. For the most part, Trump and some of his most ardent supporters were relegated to smaller platforms as they struggled to respond. The change was evident in the video montage shown by the Jan. 6 commission for the attack, where a rioter was heard shouting a Trump tweet over the phone to urge the crowd in Capitol Halls. The tweet, sent by Trump a few minutes earlier, said Vice President “Mike Pence did not have the courage to do what needed to be done” and that “the United States demands the truth!” Trump had used Twitter aggressively to rally his supporters to overturn what he falsely called a rigged election, writing on Twitter in December 2020, “WE JUST STARTED FIGHTING !!!” and “Big Protest in DC on January 6th. Be there, it will be wild! “ The tweets were widely circulated by his fans, and congressional investigators on Thursday shared video testimonials from rioters who said they saw them as calls for action. On December 13, 2020, the day before the Electoral College planned to seal President Biden’s victory, Virginia “Ginny” Thomas, wife of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, emailed a video to state lawmakers in Arizona YouTube, calling on them to “put things right.” On January 6, 2021, Trump wrote on Twitter that the states “voted for FRAUD. Στις BE STRONG! “It was only at 2:38 p.m. that he finally urged the crowd via Twitter to” stay peaceful “, after the rioters had already violated the Capitol in what a police officer said on Thursday that it looked like a bloody” war scene ” ». Later that night, Trump wrote on Twitter: “These are the things and events that happen when a sacred overwhelming election victory is stripped so unusually and violently stripped of great patriots. Σπίτι Go home with love and peace. Remember this day forever! ” Two days later, Twitter and Facebook suspended his account, citing the risk of inciting more violence. An official on Twitter, speaking on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to discuss the matter, told the Washington Post on Friday that the company’s decision-makers had understood that Trump’s tweets were playing a role in encouraging the violence, but it was unknown then that they were literally read aloud by the rioters. Trump’s newly formed clone on Twitter, Truth Social, posted a dozen messages after the hearing, criticizing him for showing “only negative shots” of the brutal siege. Starting at 6:50 a.m. Friday, Trump called former Attorney General William P. Barr “weak and frightened” and denied responsibility for the uprising. He also spoke contemptuously of Ivanka Trump’s daughter after appearing in a video at the hearing saying he believed there was no evidence of fraud that could reverse his loss. “He did not participate in the examination or study of the election results,” he wrote. “He had been checking out for a long time.” Prior to the hearing, Trump wrote – or, on Truth Social, “truth” – that January 6 “was not just a protest, it represented the largest movement in our country’s history.” The next morning, he wrote that the attack “was not provoked by me, it was provoked by rigged and stolen elections!” But Trump could only shout at a shrinking crowd: His Truth Social account has about 3 million followers, or less than the 4 percent of the 88 million Twitter followers he had before his ban. Joan Donovan, director of research at the Harvard Sorenstein Center for Media, Politics and Public Policy, suggested that it would be difficult to overestimate the significance of Trump’s tweets about the January 6 events. “The power of Trump tweets to tell people, like a military general, where to go and keep up the pressure was clear to investigators,” he said. “And it was very clear when he tweeted about leaving the building and the peace that people started listening to him and following his instructions.” The platform response in the days following the attack removed much of that force, Donovan said. “It’s not just Trump who was uninformed,” but thousands of his supporters and the Parler social network were removed from the big app stores. “Trump’s messaging infrastructure was dismantled that day. And it could not be reassembled. “ Whether major social networks allow Trump to return could have a profound effect on his ability to reorganize by 2024, Donovan added. While Facebook and YouTube suspended him indefinitely, leaving open the possibility of his return, Twitter issued a permanent ban and Twitter spokesman Trenton Kennedy said Friday that the company insists on it. However, billionaire Elon Musk, who is in the process of acquiring Twitter, has said he will bring Trump back. Some users claimed on Friday that Truth Social, which has promoted itself as a free speech shelter to compete with what they call Twitter’s censorship “censorship culture”, had worked to stifle the debate over the hearing. Travis Allen, an information security analyst in Kentucky, said his Truth Social account was suspended minutes after responding to Trump’s account there Thursday night, citing a Jan. 6 hearing. Allen, who said he was not a fan of Trump, said he could not remember exactly what he wrote, but that he did not think he was breaking the rules of the site. “I did not think the post was even remarkable,” he told the Washington Post on Friday. “It’s the culmination of hypocrisy for Truth Social to claim to support ‘freedom of speech’ and then ban users from talking about ‘hearings’. Representatives of the Trump Media & Technology Group, to which Truth Social belongs, did not respond to requests for comment. The site on Friday showed some posts criticizing Trump, although many others called the congressional inquiry a “hoax.” In February, the site banned an account that mocked former MP Devin Nunes (California), who resigned from Congress to become head of Trump’s $ 750,000-a-year company. Prior to the hearing, some pro-Trump activists urged their online followers to ignore it. Conservative radio presenter Dan Bongino posted on his Truth Social account a few minutes before the start of the audition, “Don’t miss the hockey game tonight, you must watch TV!” This online post was in line with their cable counterparts on Fox News, which showed little of the hearing and described it as a “demonstration trial against Trump” and a “fraud.” Following the hearing, Trump’s allies sought to dismiss the commission’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 organized a “Stop the Steal” rally on January 6 and testified before the committee in December, told Truth Social that the committee had used processed video and fake audio without giving any evidence to support it. reinforces these claims. “Have you ever seen videos with more fake edits and SPLICES?” He wrote. The commission’s video contained long lines of footage not previously seen by police’s cameras and Capitol surveillance cameras that revealed gruesome details of the altercation. “It simply came to our notice then. We will have too many people. “We are done,” said one officer. But much of the video also came from social media, such as Parler, the right-wing social network popular with Trump supporters at the time. In one excerpt, a man in a crowd surrounding officers on foot from the Capitol screams, “The president of the United States has invited us.” Jan. 6 commission accuses Trump of “slaughter” in US Capitol MP Liz Cheney tells Americans why January 6 should terrorize them Want to set up social media? The first amendment can stand in the way. Trump’s Truth is in trouble as financial, technical problems grow The siege of the Capitol was planned online. Trump supporters are now planning the next one. A new video released on January 6 shows a mob gathering, violence
