Gag Order: Social media influencer jailed in US for meming on 2016 election

A federal judge in New York handed Douglass Mackey, a social media influencer, a seven-month prison sentence and a two-year term of supervised probation. His crime? Making memes around the 2016 US election.

The case is regarded as a precedent-setting instance of election interference during the 2016 US presidential election. Notably, former President Donald Trump is concurrently facing charges under the same legal statute.

The prosecution contended that Mackey was involved in a conspiracy to disseminate messages aimed at provoking, misleading, and sometimes deceiving voters in the 2016 presidential election. This conspiracy included tweets encouraging Hillary Clinton’s supporters to vote by text, a method not permitted in the United States.

US Attorney Erik David Paulsen argued that Mackey’s actions constituted fraud, targeting one of the fundamental pillars of democracy. He emphasized the necessity of a prison sentence to convey a message to the general public about the seriousness of such actions.

Judge Ann M. Donnelly described the alleged conspiracy as nothing less than an attack on the democratic process. Despite Mackey residing in Florida, the case was tried in the Eastern District of New York, where Hillary Clinton had her campaign headquarters during the 2016 election.

Operating under the X pseudonym ‘Ricky Vaughn,’ named after a character portrayed by Charlie Sheen in the 1989 movie ‘Major League,’ Mackey had approximately 58,000 followers on the social media platform. A week before the November 8 election, he posted a series of memes urging Democrats to vote for Clinton via text, an unconventional method not recognized in the United States.

Hillary Clinton eventually lost the election to Republican Donald Trump, and she attributed her defeat to various factors, including the FBI, Russia, Macedonian meme producers, fake news, and disinformation.

Mackey’s arrest occurred in January 2021, just a week following Joe Biden’s presidential inauguration. He was charged with “conspiracy against rights.” The New York Times characterized him as a “white supremacist” and considered this case the first of its kind, involving voter suppression through the propagation of disinformation on X.

Prosecutors asserted that around 4,900 individuals attempted to text the number Mackey had provided, although none of them could testify to having done so. The government’s key witness was an FBI informant who couldn’t be cross-examined in court. A jury found Mackey guilty in April of this year, and he faced a potential sentence of up to ten years.

Special counsel Jack Smith has brought charges against Trump under the same Conspiracy Against Rights statute regarding the January 6, 2021, Capitol riot. The former president, who is contesting Joe Biden in the 2024 election, has decried these charges as politically motivated interference in the electoral process.