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Republicans quickly jumped to support former President Donald Trump after news of his unprecedented indictment by New York prosecutors came out on Thursday evening. After Trump’s defeat in the 2020 election, his supporters rallied online, culminating in the Jan. 6, 2021 assault on the U.S. Capitol. But this time. The former president’s supporters on far-right social media platforms appear less enthusiastic about coming to his aid.
“There’s not as much talk about ‘we’ve got to stop this’; there’s not as much talk about ‘we should do something,” says Eric Curwin, chief technology officer of Pyrra Technology, a company that monitors platforms such as Truth Social, Gab, Kiwi Farms and Bitchute that Trump supporters flocked to after Facebook, Twitter and others suspended Trump and some of his followers after Jan. 6.
The progression of events so far resembles when Trump’s Mar-a-Lago residence was searched for classified documents last summer, says Jared Holt, a researcher at nonprofit Institute of Strategic Dialogue monitoring extremism. “The same kind of claims that the government or the legal system is being weaponized against Trump to undermine his election chances…some vague commentary from random users being like, ‘Oh, let’s go, let’s do it.’
“From our early reads on this, we can’t, you know, haven’t been able to really pick out a whole lot of solid plans to actually mobilize large crowds around this ” Holt says, ” I say that with the caveat that in the weeks to come that can always change.
