Vice: Trump’s Social Media Platform Is Now Showing Ads Targeting QAnon Believers. “Former President Donald Trump’s social media platform Truth Social has become such a hive of QAnon activity that even advertisers are now trying to take advantage.”
NARA: Press Statement on Public Release of NARA Records Concerning the 15 Boxes Received from Mar-a-Lago in January 2022 . “Today, the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) is releasing documents processed in response to numerous Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests for NARA records related to the 15 boxes that we received in January 2022 from former President Trump’s Mar-a-Lago, Florida estate.”
ABC News: National Archives still missing some Trump administration records . “The National Archives has still not recovered all the presidential records that should have been turned over at the end of the Trump administration, according to a new letter to Congress from the acting archivist.”
Harvard Gazette: How to save democracy. “Donald Trump was the perfect ‘meme leader,’ appealing to an array of shadowy, loosely organized groups with varied philosophies but shared roots in internet ‘imageboards’ like 4chan and 8chan, along with a desire, like their adopted chief, to disrupt the established power structure.”
CNBC: Trump-linked SPAC changes address to UPS Store as investors pull more than $130 million. “Digital World Acquisition Corp., the blank-check company looking to take Trump Media and Technology Group public, has changed its listed address to a UPS Store in Miami. The change from a Miami office building to a UPS address came with DWAC’s regulatory filing on Friday disclosing that some investors pulled out tens of millions of dollars.”
Wall Street Journal: National Archives to Report on Whether More Trump Files Are Missing. “The National Archives faces a Tuesday deadline to update a congressional committee on a key question: Are there still documents from the Trump White House that are unaccounted for?”
Washington Post: Jan. 6 Twitter witness: Failure to curb Trump spurred ‘terrifying’ choice. “In an explosive hearing in July, an unidentified former Twitter employee testified to the House Jan. 6 committee that the company had tolerated false and rule-breaking tweets from Donald Trump for years because executives knew their service was his ‘favorite and most-used … and enjoyed having that sort of power.’”
Business Insider: Investors pull almost $140 million from the company planning to merge with Donald Trump’s Truth Social. “‘Blank-check’ company Digital World Acquisition said in a Securities and Exchange Commission filing on Friday that some backers were pulling a total of $139 million they had planned to put into the deal. Digital World had previously announced funding commitments of $1 billion. The investors who signed up for the deal about a year ago were able to back out if it was not completed by September 20.”
Tech Policy Press: It’s Time to Stop Platforming the “Big Lie” Playbook. “With Truth Social emerging as a megaphone for misinformation and extremism, tech companies that are serious about upholding their publicly professed commitments to prevent the promotion of violent content must ban Truth Social from their online stores.”
NBC News: QAnon videos are getting millions of views on TikTok as Trump embraces conspiracy theory. “QAnon conspiracy theory videos with thinly veiled hashtags are bringing in millions of views on TikTok ahead of the 2022 midterm elections. In a review conducted by NBC News, users were found posting videos with emojis and slight wording variations in hashtags to evade QAnon hashtag bans, bringing attention to the conspiracy theory that helped fuel the Jan. 6 Capitol riot.”
CNBC: Trump-linked SPAC faces new pressure from investors as merger hangs in the balance. “Digital World Acquisition Corp., the company planning to take Trump Media and Technology Group public, is facing investor concerns about a potential failed merger with former President Donald Trump’s company. The Financial Times reported Tuesday that DWAC Chief Executive Patrick Orlando is negotiating with investors who said they would back the company through a private investment in public equity, or PIPE, deal.”
Washington Post: Trump’s ‘big lie’ fueled a new generation of social media influencers. “The 2020 election and its turbulent aftermath fueled a powerful generation of online influencers, a Washington Post data analysis has found, producing sky-high follower counts for an array of conservatives who echoed Trump’s false claims of election fraud, known as the ‘big lie.’ … These accounts amassed followers despite vows by Big Tech companies to police election disinformation, The Post found.”
New York Times: How Russian Trolls Helped Keep the Women’s March Out of Lock Step. “For more than a century, Russia and the Soviet Union sought to weaken their adversaries in the West by inflaming racial and ethnic tensions….Social media now provided an easy way to feed ideas into American discourse, something that, for half a century, the K.G.B. had struggled to do. And the Russian government secretly funneled more than $300 million to political parties in more than two dozen countries in an effort to sway their policies in Moscow’s favor since 2014, according to a U.S. intelligence review made public last week.
Washington Post: Trump team claimed boxes at Mar-a-Lago were only news clippings. “Months before National Archives officials retrieved hundreds of classified documents in 15 boxes from former president Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago Club, they were told that none of the material was sensitive or classified and that Trump had only 12 boxes of ‘news clippings,’ according to people familiar with the conversations between Trump’s team and the Archives.”
