When Charleston Gazette-Mail copyeditor Chris Slater retweeted a photo from a Trump rally last month, he didn’t give it much thought. He reflexively added the words “a sea of idiocy” to the image of a large overflow crowd from a Pennsylvania rally, and he went to bed.
Soon, a wave of notifications rolled in, none of them friendly. An account with the handle @TrumpWarRoom had retweeted his post, misidentifying Slater as an editor and asking its followers to “RETWEET if you are a PROUD ‘DEPLORABLE’!”
Slater said that some of the responses he received during the next 24 hours contained obscenities and gay slurs. He was surprised to learn that the account he’d retweeted belonged to Tim Murtaugh, the communications director for President Donald Trump’s re-election campaign. He was even more surprised, though, that strangers were harassing him on Twitter because his post had been shared by a verified account operated by the Trump campaign.
“Journalists are the enemy of the people, according to Trump, and I guess they wanted to do a little public shaming,” Slater said.
Big If True reviewed the Trump War Room Twitter account’s posts since May and found that it regularly creates and shares misinformation, sometimes from other sources. This particular account demonstrates the ability of a major political campaign to consistently amplify serious falsehoods as social media platforms opt not to intervene.
As highlighted by Slater’s experience, the account considers journalists and their work a perennial target. The account frequently posts videos, presumably to back up the text from its tweets, but at times, the video’s content directly contradicts its own claim.
The Trump campaign, which did not respond to a request for comment, doesn’t identify who runs the account. Matt Wolking, who joined the campaign’s communications team in March, is responsible for the campaign’s “aggressive rapid response team, refuting attacks and exposing the fake news media.” Talking Points Memo reported in May that Wolking has a history of spreading inaccurate information that goes back to his college days, when he ran a blog that included the inaccurate claim that Muslims “danced in the streets on 9/11.”
Philip Bump, a national correspondent for The Washington Post who has written about and interacted with the account, finds similarities between the accounts run by the Trump War Room and Donald Trump Jr., the president’s son.
“He lifts stuff out of context,” Bump said. “He’s a constant attack dog, he takes on the president’s enemies and he does all these things as himself. (The Trump War Room account), I think, was perhaps even explicitly an attempt by the campaign to recreate that institutionally.”
How the Trump War Room amplifies misinformation from other sources
The Trump War Room tends to retweet and share links to stories from several sites that are hyperpartisan and contain misinformation, including “Tucker Carlson Tonight” on Fox News, The Daily Caller and The Federalist. Big If True and other publications have previously identified factual flaws that have the potential to mislead the public in each of those sources. The Trump War Room also retweeted a link from far-right site Human Events and LifeNews, a radical anti-abortion site that inaccurately equates abortion with infanticide.
Trump War Room’s Twitter has a second approach to sharing other sources’ problematic material – retweeting posts from small accounts that presumably belong to regular people. At one point last month, the War Room retweeted dozens of accounts dismissing nonpartisan reports that Trump had called Duchess of Sussex Meghan Markle nasty. The net result was the appearance that the campaign’s position – the false notion that Trump didn’t make the comment – had broad support.
The account also takes advantage of another facet of the social media platform. Whether they’re partisan or not, large accounts that criticize another user draw the risk of inadvertently or intentionally encouraging their followers to pile on their target. Critics of this move complain that it takes advantage of a power differential because smaller accounts lack an army of followers who will come to their defense.
That power differential is exemplified in the Trump War Room’s retweet of Slater’s “sea of idiocy” Tweet. For context, the campaign account has 147,000 followers; Slater has under 900.
A theme of misrepresenting the facts
On multiple occasions, Trump War Room’s Twitter account posted content with videos and screenshots that directly contradicted the validity of its claims. A few weeks ago, the account stated falsely that “The Democrat Party (sic) just announced that tens of millions of Americans who do not support aborting babies ‘have no place in this country.’” As proof, the post included a screenshot of a Democratic National Committee Tweet that said something completely different – that “incessant attacks on women’s access to reproductive health have no place in this country.”
On another occasion, the War Room said that CNN chief White House correspondent Jim Acosta lied when he Tweeted that Trump’s Rose Garden speech last month on immigration had “(painted) asylum seekers with broad brush accusing them of misleading immigration authorities at border.” Acosta quoted Trump as saying, “These are frivolous claims.”
“You know there’s video proving you’re lying, right?” the campaign’s account said, adding later, “How can you do this and go home at night thinking you’ve turned in an honest day’s work as a journalist?”
The Tweets included video and a transcript from Trump’s speech that show Trump said, “legitimate asylum seekers are being displaced by those lodging frivolous claims. These are frivolous claims, to gain admission into our country.”
Trump’s words express the idea that frivolous asylum claims outnumber and actually have “displaced” legitimate requests for asylum, backing up the reporter’s statement. Acosta noted that the transcript included the words “frivolous” and “meritless” to describe asylum claims, as well as the phrase “asylum abuse” in a Tweet that received about 1,200 responses, most of which were from Trump supporters who piled on Acosta.
An episode of this tactic that received the most attention to date involves an interview Trump did regarding Markle. At the beginning of June, Trump War Room posted: “Fake News CNN is at it again, falsely claiming President Trump called Meghan Markle ‘nasty.’ Here is what he actually said. Listen for yourself.”
The Tweet included a video with audio and closed captioning that prove Trump said of Markle during an interview with the British tabloid The Sun, “No, I didn’t know that she was nasty.”
Trump calling people “nasty” is not out of character, as he interjected during a presidential debate with former candidate Hilary Clinton that she was “such a nasty woman.” But on top of that, the video demonstrated Trump clearly saying the words.
Nonetheless, the Trump War Room account concluded in another Tweet on the subject, “FAKE NEWS is truly the ENEMY OF THE PEOPLE!”
The campaign later linked to a far-right site misinforming readers that Trump never called Markle “nasty,” and then retweeted dozens of accounts, presumed to belong to actual individuals, who said that the media was lying and Trump’s words were taken out of context. A number of those Tweets parroted the phrases “enemy of the people” and “fake news” to describe journalists and news outlets.
This day in the life of the War Room account is typical due to its frequent attacks on journalists, as well as nonpartisan and liberal news outlets. At one point, the War Room accused CNN and the channel’s chief national security correspondent, Jim Sciutto, of being “a mouthpiece for the Kremlin.”
Bump, who wrote about Trump’s Markle comment for the Washington Post, said the Trump War Room was playing a semantics game that took advantage of the way the comment was structured. In that way, the account successfully reframed Trump’s comment for its audience.
“They’re leveraging this idea, both that there’s vagueness around how the sentence itself was constructed, and secondarily, that the media is inherently untrustworthy and that Trump is trustworthy,” Bump said.
Daniel Funke, who covers misinformation for The Poynter Institute’s International Fact-Checking Network, said that using video or photos out of context is a common method for spreading misinformation because it’s easier than altering visual content or deliberately creating false information. He cited hoaxes that spread after the Notre Dame Cathedral fire this year, such as a 2016 article that began to circulate. That story, which described a car filled with “Arabic documents” and gas tanks near Notre Dame, had been published three years earlier and wasn’t connected to the fire.
“Those posts racked up thousands of engagements, and they didn’t even create misinformation,” Funke said.
Niche issues for the campaign
In general, the War Room account responds to the news of the day, but since May, there have been several recurring issues, like the Mueller investigation. For instance, the account posted that Trump fully cooperated with the investigation despite the facts that the president refused to be interviewed and provided answers in writing to questions about Russia. He refused to answer any questions related to the obstruction of justice probe.
The War Room also shared a series of C-SPAN clips showing Democrats reading portions of the Mueller report that say the investigation found no evidence that Trump’s campaign colluded with Russia during the country’s election interference. Each post includes the hashtag #NoCollusion and thanks the legislator.
Such clips, while not inaccurate, mislead the public by neglecting to mention the obstruction portion of the investigation report, which did not explicitly state that Trump had not committed obstruction crimes.
Another subject that came up again and again was abortion. The account regularly and inaccurately equates abortion with infanticide, sometimes implied and other times explicitly. For instance, the Trump War Room accused U.S. Sen. Amy Klobuchar, D-Minnesota, of voting for a non-existent “pro-infanticide bill” and re-upped clips from earlier this year that led to the enduring abortion-infanticide comparison. The account also retweets links from LifeNews, including a post that alleged without merit that House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Democrats blocked a bill to stop infanticide.
Americans blame politicians for ‘made-up’ news and don’t expect the problem to get better
Issues raised with the Trump War Room account reiterate long-running questions about the role of social media in spreading misinformation. Platforms are reluctant to remove content that contains false or misleading information, including hoaxes or conspiracy theories, let alone political content that would lead to accusations of censorship if taken down.
In a recent debacle, Facebook refused to take down a video of Pelosi that was altered to make her appear drunk. The video was taken down at some point weeks later, and Facebook told CNET they weren’t responsible. The account that posted the video, Politics WatchDog, said Facebook did it.
Before the removal, Facebook opted to place posts from its factchecking partnership next to the video, which received at least 2.8 million views before it was deleted. Facebook’s factchecking program has received its share of criticism, but Poynter’s Funke pointed out that Twitter doesn’t have a similar program in place.
“Twitter is this place where hoaxes spread extremely rapidly because it’s the nature of the platform, and Twitter does not have a really good way to curb that spread,” Funke said. “Twitter is kind of the wild west for misinformation.”
In recent responses to the issue, Twitter announced last week its purchase of tech start-up Fabula AI, which could be used to identify misinformation. In May, the social network debuted putting information from the Department of Health and Human Services at the top of search results for vaccines.
Last week, the Pew Research Center released a study on Americans’ attitudes toward “made-up news,” a term for completely fabricated stories that originally went by the name “fake news.” That phrase was quickly reappropriated by politicians like Trump to serve as an attack against credible news stories and the media.
Pew’s researchers found that the majority of Americans – 79 percent – believe actions should be taken to restrict made-up news. Politicians are perceived as the biggest creator of made-up news, with 57 percent of those surveyed blaming political leaders and their staff for the problem. In a swiping departure from Trump’s rhetoric, 53 percent of Americans think the news media has the most responsibility to reduce made-up news.
In a particularly bleak finding from the study, only 1 in 10 people polled think the problem will get better.
“I think overall what it speaks to is that Americans do have this level of concern and anxiety about the issue of made up news,” said Jeffrey Gottfried, a Pew senior researcher and co-author of the study. “We see that play out in a number of respects, whether it’s that they see it as a larger problem than a number of other issues impacting the country, or whether they see it as impacting our country’s democratic system.”
Contact Mollie Bryant at 405-990-0988 or bryant@bigiftrue.org. Follow her on Facebook and Twitter.
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