In the last Presidential election Trump ran a hugely successful Facebook ad campaign. By micro-targeting vulnerable Facebook users with fake news and disinformation the Trump team were able to reach and influence millions of voters. Towards the end of last year Mark Zuckerberg announced that he would allow the Trump campaign to again run fake ads in this year's Presidential election. Trump's campaign team are therefore gearing up to spread even more fake news and disinformation during the 2020 Presidential campaign.
It is believed that the Trump campaign has now managed to compile on average around 3,000 data points on every voter. In other words they know exactly which fake news and which disinformation triggers which voters and which voters are most likely to spread fake news and disinformation memes.
In the 2020 Presidential election the Trump campaign intends to extend their fake news disinformation campaign much, much further. For this year's election they are developing a texting platform which is designed to exploit Trump supporters into spreading disinformation and fake news by passing on Trump campaign text messages to everyone in their phone contacts. The Trump campaign is also setting up hundreds of fake local newspaper websites all across the USA.
Research has shown that Americans trust local news networks more than they trust the national media. The Trump campaign and the alt-right have therefore been busy setting up websites across the United States which appear to be local newspapers or news services. However during the election they will be used to spread Trump's fake news and promote disinformation about his Democratic opponent. MassMove has set up a GitHub page and an interactive map to monitor these fake local news sites, all of which have been designed to spread fake news and disinformation during the 2020 election campaign.
The MassMove Local Journals map shows the locations of towns across the USA where a fake news site has been established. For example just in Houston the Trump campaign has set up fake news sites called the Houston Republic, SE Houston News, East Houston News, West Houston News, SW Houston News.
You can learn more about Trump's 2020 fake news disinformation campaign on the Mass Move - Attack Vectors GitHub repository.
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