The Absence of "The Donald"
In the several hundred criminal cases brought against individuals involved in the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol, the Department of Justice and FBI have included scores of incriminating communications posted by defendants on social media sites including Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and Parler. That makes even more conspicuous the near complete absence of any reference in the government documents to another public social media site – The Donald, where much of the Capitol attack was planned.
On Dec. 19, 2020, at 1:42 a.m. EST, then President Donald Trump tweeted, “Statistically impossible to have lost the 2020 Election. Big protest in D.C. on January 6th. Be there, will be wild!” Within five minutes after Trump’s tweet, a user on The Donald posted: “Trump Tweet. Daddy says be in DC on Jan. 6th.” The site’s moderators pinned the post to the top of the homepage where it remained until the morning of Jan. 6, 2021, attracting nearly 6,000 comments and 24,000 upvotes.
It was the first of thousands of posts and comments on the site related to Jan. 6. Users of The Donald declared that Trump’s tweet about Jan. 6 was “marching orders,” and one user interpreted a video from Dan Scavino — a well known figure to the community — as “literal war drums.” “The capitol is our goal,” posted another user. “Everything else is a distraction. Every corrupt member of congress locked in one room and surrounded by real Americans is an opportunity that will never present itself again.”
Tracking the reaction on The Donald, SITE Intelligence Group, an organization that monitors political extremism, explained that “the general consensus among the users was that Trump had essentially tweeted permission to disregard the law in support of him.”
https://www.justsecurity.org/79446/the-absence-of-the-donald/
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