Douglass Mackey was sentenced on Wednesday to seven months in prison after he was found guilty of using social media to spread misinformation about voting in the 2016 election.
Mackey, a supporter of former President Donald Trump, had shared to his tens of thousands of followers on X, formerly known as Twitter, deceptive memes directed at supporters of Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton. The memes falsely instructed voters days before the election that they could cast ballots digitally via text.
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Prosecutors also uncovered private direct messages between Mackey and others in which they “discussed and agreed on the coordinated dissemination through their public Twitter accounts of misinformation intended variously to provoke, mislead, and, in some cases, deceive voters in the 2016 presidential election,” according to court filings.
Mackey, who operated online under the alias “Ricky Vaughn,” was convicted in March of one charge of conspiring with others to interfere with the rights of U.S. citizens to vote.
“This groundbreaking prosecution demonstrates our commitment to prosecuting those who commit crimes that threaten our democracy and seek to deprive people of their constitutional right to vote,” United States Attorney Breon Peace said in a statement after the sentence was delivered.
The sentencing decision is a win for prosecutors, who sought six to 12 months for Mackey, according to a court document.
They pointed to Mackey’s frequent inflammatory social media posts as evidence that the misleading voting memes “manifested the defendant’s routinely expressed opinions about who should and should not be able to vote.”
Mackey had, among his many posts, spread racist remarks about black voters, wrote that immigrants could not be trusted with voting rights, and said women’s suffrage was a “terrible thing.”
“The defendant genuinely believed at the time he participated in the conspiracy that black people, women, immigrants and various other political opponents should be prevented from voting,” prosecutors stated, arguing that context helped to demonstrate Mackey’s crime was “deliberate and calculated.”
Mackey’s defense team said in a court filing that he was a changed man who had gone through therapy and gotten married and whose wife was now expecting a baby in November.
His lawyers said he had shared the incriminating memes in an impulsive manner rather than in the calculated way that prosecutors had described.
They asked the judge to impose a non-custodial sentence, saying, “Mr. Mackey acted with no planning other than the act of clicking upon seeing the memes.”
Other influential X users on the Right shared statements defending Mackey upon learning of his punishment.
Greg Price, who works in communications for state Freedom Caucus groups, compared Mackey’s actions to those of another X user who had shared a similar meme apparently aimed at tricking Trump voters, saying that person had gone unpunished.
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Jack Posobiec, who has more than 2 million X followers, said, “Douglass Mackey, a meme maker, got sent to jail for making memes and that’s election interference. The country you grew up in no longer exists.”
Elon Musk, who owns X, reacted by saying, “That had no material impact on the election. What prison sentences were given out to those who suppressed the Hunter Biden laptop information?”
