The teen troll farm run by the Trump-loving nonprofit Turning Points USA did more than just spam social media with MAGA memes. After the Washington Post revealed the troll operation, The Daily Beast found two more accounts linked to the TPUSA effort, one of which was using the #plandemic hashtag to frame the coronavirus pandemic as part of a conspiracy to rig the 2020 election.
After The Daily Beast shared its findings with Twitter, the company suspended the accounts for violating Twitter’s rules on platform manipulation and spam. But before they went dark, the TPUSA-linked accounts were spamming social media with copy-pasted takes on everything from misinformation about mail-in voting, masks, and the K-pop boy band BTS.
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Made in America troll farm: The Washington Post first revealed the existence of a TPUSA-driven social media sock puppet operation, which hired sometimes underage teenagers to push pro-Trump messages on Twitter and Facebook at a Phoenix, Arizona, “marketing” farm enlisted in the cause of improving President Trump’s image.
After the Post’s story ran, Facebook and Twitter shut down around accounts associated with the effort—but Twitter didn’t get them all. The Daily Beast found two accounts linked to the effort by their use of shared verbatim talking points, including text originally reported in the Post’s story.
One of them, @vincej456, used health misinformation in order to discredit the use of masks during the pandemic and insinuate that the virus was part of a larger election conspiracy.
“1.5 millon people died of Tuberculosis in 2018, according to the WHO. TB is an extremely infectious disease. Why didn’t they mandate masks then?,” the account wrote. “Why didn’t they close everything down then? Oh, right...because 2018 wasn’t an election year! #plandemic” @vincej456 wrote.
Tuberculosis is indeed a deadly disease—but one for which there’s a vaccine and the one 1.5 million deaths represent the total for the planet, not the U.S., which tends to have just a few hundred each year.
The #plandemic hashtag is a reference to the notorious viral conspiracy documentary of the same name which went viral on social media at the beginning of the pandemic before tech companies booted the quack science from their platforms. In it, former virologist Judy Mikovits spins a false narrative that a cabal of elites including Dr. Anthony Fauci secretly created the virus in order to control the planet and that masks “activate” the coronavirus, rather than prevent its spread.
A TPUSA spokesperson declined to comment when reached by The Daily Beast.
Copypasta: To the outside world, the @uncleryry17 Twitter might look like a normal young person’s account but it used the same word-for-word talking points as accounts busted by the Post. One of the talking points from the TPUSA trolls identified by the Post included an awkwardly phrased dig at mail-in ballots that claimed the votes “will lead to fraud for this election.”
The @uncleryry17 account used that exact phrase in the same talking point, which warned in part that “The USPS will be even more backed up than it is now if we widely adopt mail-in ballots.
The account tweeted the exact same phrase half a dozen times as part of a larger pattern of “reply guy” behavior often used by lower follower accounts looking to get attention by piggybacking on the replies of larger accounts.
Using the @uncleryry17 account as a springboard, The Daily Beast was able to find the @vincej45 account. Both used the same talking point—right down to the same typo and capitalization—to attack Dr. Fauci.
“In a report, Dr Fauci argued that their mortality rate of the coronavirus may be much closer to a "very bad flu." Dr. Fauci based all of his predictions on inaccurate IHME models that were OFF BY MILLIONS and then told reporters you 'can't really rely on models” both accounts tweeted.
Talking points: Both accounts engaged in the same pattern of behavior—piggybacking in the replies of prominent media accounts and copy-pasting the same talking points over and over again. The topics they touched on included conversvative spin on the same hot-button election year issues, including anti-mask commentary, calling the leadership of the Black Lives Matter movement “trained Marxists,” and spreading misinformation about the threat of voter fraud through the use of mail-in ballots.
The @uncleryry17 account also took a swing at the use of masks, falsely claiming that “There is no scientific evidence that masks work.”
BTS vs TPUSA: There are hints that the TPUSA troll farm operators wanted to go after another army of politically minded teen social media swarm: the K-pop boy band BTS.
BTS fans, among the most terrifyingly devoted and numerous fanbases on the Internet, became a nuisance for the Trump campaign when fans of the boy band mounted a viral campaign to pump up a Trump rally in Oklahoma with fake registrations, which may have contributed to the campaign’s overly optimistic pronouncements about turnout and campaign manager Brad Parscale’s loss of stature within the re-election effort.
During the protesters over the police killing of George Floyd, fans of the K-pop group also rendered the #WhiteLivesMatter hashtag useless by mass spamming it with endless BTS memes and matched their idols’ million dollar donation to the Black Lives Matter movement with a crowdfunded donation of their own.
TPUSA’s own teen meme army weren’t big fans. "BTS sucks. It makes my ears bleed!" the @uncleryry17 account repeatedly tweeted in early September.
