{"id":107023,"date":"2020-11-07T10:12:36","date_gmt":"2020-11-07T07:12:36","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/en.buradabiliyorum.com\/text-company-that-sent-incendiary-messages-traced-back-to-top-trump-aide\/"},"modified":"2020-11-07T10:12:36","modified_gmt":"2020-11-07T07:12:36","slug":"text-company-that-sent-incendiary-messages-traced-back-to-top-trump-aide","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/text-company-that-sent-incendiary-messages-traced-back-to-top-trump-aide\/","title":{"rendered":"#text company that sent incendiary messages traced back to top Trump aide"},"content":{"rendered":"

“#text company that sent incendiary messages traced back to top Trump aide<\/strong>”<\/p>\n

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A texting company run by one of President Donald Trump\u2019s top campaign officials sent out thousands of targeted, anonymous text messages urging supporters to rally where votes were being counted in Philadelphia on Thursday, falsely claiming Democrats were trying to steal the presidential election.<\/p>\n

The messages directed Trump fans to converge at a downtown intersection where hundreds of protesters from the opposing candidates\u2019 camps faced off Thursday afternoon. Pennsylvania is a crucial battleground state where former Vice President Joe Biden\u2019s jumped ahead Friday and in a televised address later predicted a victory that would give him the presidency.<\/p>\n

\u201cThis kind of message is playing with fire, and we are very lucky that it does not seem to have driven more conflict,\u201d said John Scott-Railton, senior researcher at the University of Toronto\u2019s online watchdog Citizen Lab. Scott-Railton helped track down the source.<\/p>\n

The texts were sent using phone numbers leased to the text-messaging platform Opn Sesame, said two people familiar with the matter who spoke on condition they not be further identified. The company\u2019s CEO is Gary Coby, the Trump campaign\u2019s digital director. It provides text-messaging services to GOP clients including the Republican National Committee.<\/p>\n

\u201cALERT: Radical Liberals & Dems are trying to steal this election from Trump! We need YOU!\u201d the text said, directing recipients to \u201cshow your support\u201d on a street corner near the Philadelphia Convention Center where votes were being counted and tensions were running high.<\/p>\n

\"This
This image provided by Chris Bray shows a message he received Thursday via a texting company run by Gary Coby, one of President Donald Trump\u2019s top campaign officials.<\/span>Chris Bray via AP<\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

A top Trump campaign official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said the message did not come from the campaign. Because Opn Sesame is used by multiple customers, none of whom the company would identify, it could not be determined exactly who sent the message. Coby declined to comment.<\/p>\n

Opn Sesame\u2019s connection with the messages was first reported by The Washington Post.<\/p>\n

Among those who received the rallying text was Chris Bray, who lives in rural Bucks County, about 25 miles outside Philadelphia.<\/p>\n

A registered Independent who said he voted for Biden, Bray said he was very surprised to see the message pop up on his phone since he never signed up for anything related to the Trump campaign.<\/p>\n

\u201cI actually texted a number of other friends to say \u2018hey, have you guys been getting robo-texts like this?\u2019\u201d Bray said Friday. \u201cIt was a call to action. It borders on that the rhetoric that we\u2019ve been hearing for months now and that\u2019s really dangerous if you get the right people together with a slight screw loose, we just don\u2019t know what can happ<\/a>en.\u201d<\/p>\n

Later Thursday night,\u00a0two men were arrested\u00a0near the convention center for carrying loaded handguns without a permit, Police Commissioner Danielle Outlaw said. District Attorney Larry Krasner said there were no indications they were part of an extremist group. Their vehicle bore a window sticker for the right-wing conspiracy theory QAnon and an AR-style rifle and ammunition inside, Outlaw said.<\/p>\n

The text messages were sent using 13 different phone numbers identified by RoboKiller, a mobile phone app that lets users block text and voice spam, said company vice president Giulia Porter. RoboKiller traced the numbers to Twilio, a gateway for bulk-messaging services.<\/p>\n

After being notified, Twilio shut down the numbers, saying in a statement that the texts \u201cwere sent without consumer opt-out language, which is in direct contravention of our policies.\u201d A company spokesman declined further comment.<\/p>\n

About 80 million political text messages have been sent daily since September in the U.S. \u2014 many of those from the Trump camp echoing his baseless claims that Democrats were trying to steal the election, said RoboKiller\u2019s Porter. They are highly targeted.<\/p>\n

Political text-messaging campaigns can exploit the same flaws in telecommunications infrastructure that let robocallers hide their origin. They can spoof the numbers they call from and auto-blast thousands of texts with a single mouse click.<\/p>\n

Opn Sesame has earned millions as a hub of text-messaging efforts for the Trump campaign and the Republican National Committee this election cycle, said a digital Republican strategist, who spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of political retribution.<\/p>\n

Facebook<\/a> and Twitter cracked down on disinformation\u00a0in the runup to the election, making text messaging and\u00a0robocalls\u00a0<\/a>more attractive to those seeking to spread false and sometimes dangerous messages directly to voters via their phones.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe extent to which these companies are relying upon loopholes in the law and a lack of regulation in this space has really staggered me,\u201d said\u00a0Sam Woolley<\/a>, a misinformation and computational propaganda researcher at the University of Texas at Austin.<\/p>\n

\u201cThey really want to circumvent the need to rely social media firms which is why they are using these private mechanisms,\u201d he added. \u201cThey are using tech that we don\u2019t think of as particularly new, texting, calling, but using them in ways that are very Machiavellian.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n

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Source<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

“#text company that sent incendiary messages traced back to top Trump aide” A texting company run by one of President Donald Trump\u2019s top campaign officials sent out thousands of targeted, anonymous text messages urging supporters to rally where votes were being counted in Philadelphia on Thursday, falsely claiming Democrats were trying to steal the presidential…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":107024,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"fifu_image_url":"https:\/\/nypost.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/2\/2020\/11\/0305C9DA-5F5E-4649-B514-EB7132EAA54C.jpeg?quality=90&strip=all&w=1200","fifu_image_alt":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[70897],"tags":[79021,70327,4941,71104,4965],"class_list":["post-107023","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-news","tag-11-7-20","tag-2020-presidential-election","tag-donald-trump","tag-pennsylvania","tag-technology"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/107023","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=107023"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/107023\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/107024"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=107023"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=107023"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=107023"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}