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Related: Editorials & Other Articles, Issue Forums, Alliance Forums, Region ForumsTrump retweets some 60 anti-Biden tweets, elevating some questionable accounts
President Donald Trump went on a Twitter spree Wednesday morning in attempt to show that he has support from firefighters after former Vice President Joe Biden, the newest 2020 Democratic presidential candidate, netted an endorsement from one of the nation's largest firefighter unions last week.
The International Association of Fire Fighters, a union that represents more than 300,000 firefighters, endorsed Biden last week. The endorsement was a loss for Trump and a sign that Biden may put up a strong fight for middle class voters who propelled Trump to his 2016 victory.
To push back on the endorsement, Trump retweeted about 60 Twitter users in less than an hour who said they supported him over Biden. Each of the users the president retweeted were responding to a tweet in support of Trump from a conservative radio host.
But it was unclear if each response from the nearly 60 strangers that were retweeted to Trump's 59.9 million followers were legitimate accounts or not -- a continuous question as another presidential election nears and the magnitude of social media disinformation grows.
Whom did the president retweet?
Of the users Trump retweeted Wednesday morning, one account clearly used "very carefully crafted verbatim content" directed at particular users and frequently used by coordinated disinformation campaigns, according to an analysis by Darren Linvill, an associate professor at Clemson University who researches social media and disinformation coordination, including the Russian Internet Research Agency.
Another user Trump retweeted was determined to likely be a bot, according to a tool developed by students at the University of California at Berkeley that tracks patterns of political bots.
https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/trump-retweets-60-anti-biden-tweets-responding-firefighter/story?id=62749113
Totally Tunsie
(10,885 posts)You can almost smell the fear!
genxlib
(5,527 posts)That this is all he has to do with his time.