In the morning hours of Oct. 30, as most of the country slept, President Trump was binge tweeting again.
At 2:32 a.m., he told his 87.3 million Twitter followers: “Way ahead in Texas! Watch the Great Red Wave!”
Minutes later, he tweeted the hashtag #BidenCrimeFamiily, with a typo in the word “family.” That was it. No context, no link.
#BidenCrimeFamily is part of a yearlong, effective disinformation campaign against Joe Biden. In the final days of the presidential race, the hashtag was used on Twitter and Facebook, as well as the darker parts of the web, including 4chan and Parler. It was repeated in the right-wing media ecosystem, like Steve Bannon’s podcast and The Gateway Pundit.
In the last month, on Facebook alone, it reached at least 277,000 people, according to CrowdTangle — and that’s only on non-private pages. Without the hashtag, the slogan has had more than a million public interactions this month on Facebook.
On Wednesday afternoon, with the presidential race unresolved, a protester in Nevada interrupted an election official’s news conference by yelling, “The Biden crime family is stealing the election!”
#BidenCrimeFamily, and the typo, is a crash course in how to rally supporters around a conspiracy theory — while neutering the attempts of social media companies to stop it. Mr. Trump has used this same tactic to sow doubt about mail-in ballots and the integrity of the election.
It’s effective because it’s simple. The hashtag took a complicated issue with legitimate questions about Hunter Biden’s business dealings with Ukraine and China — and reduced it to a slogan that could also be used to spread falsehoods about Joe Biden. (An election-year investigation by Senate Republicans found no evidence of improper influence or wrongdoing by Mr. Biden.)
Constant repetition makes the charge sound true, and blunts accusations of unethical behavior against Mr. Trump’s own children. With the hashtag, Mr. Trump found a way to tell supporters: Here is all you need to know about the Democratic nominee.
And Mr. Trump’s typo? It was surely not accidental. That extra “i” circumvented Twitter’s efforts to hide the hashtag in search results. Called #typosquatting, this tactic is often used by trolls and media manipulators to get around the rules of social media platforms.
