Pro Donald Trump group pays teens to spread lies on social media

Twitter has suspended about 20 accounts after learning that campus-based group Turning Point USA had paid teenagers to spread election misinformation.

On May 27 US President Donald Trump threatened to shutter social media platforms after Twitter acted against his false tweets for the first time. Picture: AFP

A pro-Trump youth group is paying teenagers to pump distorted claims about the election on to social media.

Twitter suspended at least 20 accounts after being alerted to the scheme operated by Turning Point USA, a campus-based conservative campaign organisation.

Turning Point Action, a branch of the group, paid activists to push pro-Trump viewpoints on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram, The Washington Post said. Some of the posts were merely partisan, but others were misleading. One, for example, said coronavirus numbers were being deliberately inflated, adding: “It’s hard to know what to believe.”

Another questioned the probity of the leading White House expert on the virus, telling people: “Don’t trust Dr Fauci.” On Facebook a post asserted that postal ballots “will lead to fraud for this election”, echoing Mr Trump’s public comments. On Instagram the group pushed a false claim that 28 million postal votes had gone missing in the past four elections.

Robert Jason Noonan said that his daughters, aged 16 and 17, had been paid since June to put across “conservative points of view and values” on social media. “The job is theirs until they want to quit or until the election,” he said.

US President Donald Trump on tour at the Bioprocess Innovation Center at Fujifilm Diosynth Biotechnologies in Morrisville, North Carolina in July. Picture: AFP

Graham Brookie, director of the digital forensic research lab at the Atlantic Council, said: “In 2016 there were Macedonian teenagers interfering in the election by running a troll farm and writing salacious articles for money. In this election the troll farm is in Phoenix.” Turning Point’s headquarters are in the city.

Turning Point Action said that comparing its work to a troll farm was a “gross mischaracterisation”. It added that the postings were “sincere political activism conducted by real people who passionately hold the beliefs they describe online”.

Charlie Kirk, 26, Turning Point’s founder, gave the opening speech at the Republican convention last month, declaring Mr Trump to be “the bodyguard of western civilisation”.

The revelation came after Mr Trump held a testy televised question and answer session with undecided voters in Pennsylvania. The president has staged frequent rallies, albeit downsized by the pandemic, but they have mostly been with crowds of supporters.

On Tuesday night he seemed at times to struggle with the scrutiny of less partisan voters. Ellesia Blaque, an English tutor at Kutztown University, questioned him on healthcare. He used it as an opportunity to attack the “socialised medicine” plans supported by left-wing Democrats. “He didn’t answer my question,” Ms Blaque said later. “I’m going to vote for Biden,” she told CNN, saying that her encounter with the president had “reanimated me to vote”.

The early stretch of the 90-minute event was taken up with questions over Mr Trump’s handling of coronavirus. He insisted he had done a “tremendous” job and said that “a lot of people think masks are not good” when asked by one of the undecided voters why he did not wear a mask more often in public. Asked who opposed masks, the president identified waiters.

Pressed on his claims early in the pandemic that the virus would simply “disappear”, Mr Trump said: “It is going to disappear. I still say that.” He added: “It would go away without the vaccine … but with a vaccine, I think it will go away very quickly.”

Mr Biden, who will face a televised session today (Thursday), spent Tuesday trying to win over Hispanic voters in the swing state of Florida. He opened his speech by playing a clip on his phone of the 2017 hit Despacito, by the Puerto Rican singer Luis Fonsi. He bobbed his head, almost dancing, for about 15 seconds.

Mr Trump then retweeted a doctored version with the audio changed to suggest that Mr Biden had been dancing to a rapper chanting “f*** the police”. Twitter labelled the post as “manipulated media”.

The Times