Trumps Most Influential White Nationalist Troll Is A Middlebury Grad Who Lives In Manhattan

[MelissaB]

Trump’s Most Influential White Nationalist Troll Is A Middlebury Grad Who Lives In Manhattan

Twitter troll “Ricky Vaughn” had a bigger influence on the 2016 election than NBC News and the Drudge Report. Here’s who he really is.

Who is Ricky Vaughn? That was one of the big questions for anyone following far-right politics during the 2016 presidential election. The Twitter troll who took his name and avatar from Charlie Sheen’s character in “Major League” was everywhere on social media, an indefatigable circulator of edgy memes and rah-rah Donald Trump boosterism.

And anti-Semitism and white nationalism:

Lots of it:

There was no mistaking Ricky Vaughn’s influence. He had tens of thousands of followers, and his talent for blending far-right propaganda with conservative messages on Twitter made him a key disseminator of extremist views to Republican voters and a central figure in the “alt-right” white supremacist movement that attached itself to Trump’s coattails. The MIT Media Lab named him to its list of top 150 influencers on the election, based on news appearances and social media impact. He finished ahead of NBC News, Drudge Report and Stephen Colbert. Mainstream conservatives didn’t know they were retweeting an avowed racist and anti-Semite, but they liked what Ricky Vaughn had to say.

“He did this thing that people connected to organized white nationalism have not been able to do ― walk both sides of the extremist line in the sand,” said Keegan Hankes, a data intelligence expert at the Southern Poverty Law Center.

Ricky Vaughn also played an important role in amplifying disinformation injected into American politics by the Russian government. HuffPost and a team of data scientists known as Susan Bourbaki Anthony that tracks online propaganda analyzed who was retweeting the now infamous Kremlin-controlled Twitter account @TEN_GOP, which consistently praised Trump, attacked Democratic rival Hillary Clinton and churned out a vile medley of racism, Islamophobia and “fake news.”

More: https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/trump-white-nationalist-troll-ricky-vaughn_us_5ac53167e4b09ef3b2432627?gr

[MelissaB]

1. To get a sense of how powerful the account was, consider this: The MIT Media Lab named him to its li

To get a sense of how powerful the account was, consider this: The MIT Media Lab named him to its list of top 150 influencers on the election, based on news appearances and social media impact. He finished ahead of NBC News, Drudge Report and Stephen Colbert.

Link to tweet

Ricky Vaughn helped amplify messages from Twitter accounts later found to be Kremlin-controlled.

Link to tweet

[Eliot Rosewater]

2. Attacked ONLY Hillary and no other candidates.

[bettyellen]

3. Started out as an anti feminist gamer gate asshole, got into racism as a sideline....

Fired last summer, LOL.

[mahatmakanejeeves]

4. Whoops. NT

[procon]

5. How does someone go so far off into the weeds at such a young age?

Hate is taught. From the little revealed in the article, his parents seem normal enough, but he sounds like a brainwashed cult member, wasting his life spreading lies. Did he get radicalized on the internet like so many religious fanatics who turn into Isis terrorists?