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In the minutes after a gunman wearing body armor tried to break into an FBI field office in Cincinnati, an account with the suspect’s name, Ricky Shiffer, posted on former President Donald Trump’s social network, Truth Social: “If you don’t know. me, it’s true that I tried to attack the FBI”
Shiffer’s account appeared to be one of Truth Social’s most prolific posters, posting 374 posts in the past eight days, mostly echoing Trump’s lies about voter fraud and, in the hours since, the FBI agents searched Trump’s home in Florida, asking for everything. war “Be ready to kill the enemy,” Shiffer had posted on Tuesday. “To kill [the FBI] in sight.”
Shiffer was killed in a shooting Thursday, police said, and the Truth Social account has since been taken down. But calls for pro-Trump violence remain a regular presence online, including on Truth Social, where the top “trending topics” Friday morning were “#FBIcorruption” and “DefundTheFBI.”
Truth Social’s parent company, Trump Media & Technology Group, did not respond to requests for comment.
The Cincinnati shooting offers a glimpse of the real-world dangers of Trump and allied Republicans’ ongoing attacks on federal officials in the days since FBI agents searched Mar-a-Lago, Trump’s Palm Beach estate and the center of his post-presidential operations.
It also showed how such violent anger could be fostered on display in unmoderated online havens like Truth Social, where Trump supporters often tear down perceived enemies and call for civil war.
A gunman has been identified in an attack on an FBI field office, but the motive remains unsolved
Trump has repeatedly attacked FBI and Justice Department officials in public messages, including on Truth Social, where he told his more than 3 million followers Thursday that the Mar-a-Lago search was “an attack surprise, POLITICS, and all the time our Country is going to hell!”
People familiar with the investigation told the Washington Post that the FBI had searched the house while looking for classified documents related to nuclear weapons that could pose a serious threat to national security.
A Twitter account under Shiffer’s name included many messages mimicking Trump’s false claims of a stolen election. But a review of his social media accounts shows that Shiffer was most active recently on Truth Social, the Twitter clone Trump created after most social networks blocked him after the U.S. Capitol riots on 6 January 2021. In April, Shiffer tweeted at Trump’s son, Donald Trump Jr., who had just opened his account there, adding, “I’m just waiting for your dad.”
Authorities declined to comment on whether Shiffer was connected to the Truth Social and Twitter accounts, but both listed his name, photo and general location and had been active before the shooting.
A law enforcement official familiar with the investigation told The Post that agents are looking into Shiffer’s possible ties to extremist groups, including the Proud Boys, a far-right group whose leaders are accused of helping launch the January 6, 2021 attack in the US. capitol
The FBI searched Trump’s home for nuclear documents and other items, sources say
A review of Truth Social’s activity on Shiffer’s account showed that he had posted dozens of times a day on the site, responding to pro-Trump influencers, attacking the government and suggesting that violence was the most important way in which true Trump believers could defend the former president.
Similar messages are common on the site, including from Trump himself. In May, Trump reposted — or, in Truth Social terminology, “ReTruthed” — a message from another user that read: “Civil War.”
But Shiffer’s Truth Social account, which had 23 followers, showed him not only expressing anger but calling for direct action to spark armed conflict, urging Trump supporters to stock up on bullets and “take heart, mind and body ready to jump.” to the civil war”.
On August 5, he posted: “This country has never had a worse enemy. 1776 was for much less, even World War II was for less.” That day, he also wrote: “Save ammo and be ready and willing to hit the road as soon as you hear it’s started. Someone who wanted to be a hero couldn’t have lived in a better time period.” The post has been liked 24 times.
Shiffer’s posts seemed to regard the Mar-a-Lago search as a triggering event. On August 8, the day of the search, he posted: “Guys, this is it. … This is my call to arms. Leave work tomorrow as soon as the gun shop opens, get what you need to be ready for combat. We must not tolerate this once.”
On August 9, he posted that “the patriots are headed for Palm Beach” and that if “the feds” try to break it up, they’ll “kill them.” “Damn direct insurrection against the people who usurped our government,” he wrote in a separate post that day. “I hope to see you there (I won’t be unarmed this time).”
His second most recent public post was a meme image showing Trump in the White House: “Retruth To If You Want President Donald Trump Back In Office!” In his latest post on August 11, the day police say he tried to break into the FBI office, he said: “Well, I thought I had a way through the bulletproof glass , and I didn’t. If you don’t know about me, it’s true that I tried to attack the FBI, and that means either I got kicked off the internet, the FBI got me, or the regular cops were sent in while” , before ending abruptly.
All of the posts were visible as of Thursday night and there is no indication that Truth Social had attempted to remove them prior to their disappearance.
The threat of violence is highlighted by the search of Trump’s property
Shiffer’s profile said he was a construction electrician in Columbus, Ohio, who previously had accounts on Twitter, the video site Rumble and other sites blocked or deleted. In his biography, he wrote: “I’m ready to handle this like an American.”
The FBI said Thursday that Shiffer had attempted to enter the field office’s visitor screening area before fleeing onto an interstate. He stopped and raised a gun at police before officers shot and killed him, authorities said.
Since the FBI office’s attempted breach, some Truth Social users, including a verified account with 74,000 followers who said he was the site’s designer, have also shared unsubstantiated conspiracy theories suggesting that the attack was a “false flag” orchestrated to make Trump look bad.
After months of weak user activity and technical issues, Truth Social remains a minor player on the Internet with fewer than 4 million users, a tiny fraction of the 88 million Twitter followers Trump had before his ban.
Since Jan. 6, Trump’s online audience has fractured between several right-wing sites competing for the same limited followers, including Gab, Gettr and Parler, where follower counts have stagnated this year.
But David Thiel, a researcher at the Stanford Internet Observatory who has studied the site, said Truth Social has specialized as an endless Trump rally that functions almost like a fan message board, full of devotees. eager to reassure other members of Trump’s base.
“It’s incredibly boring in many ways. It’s not where the content producers are putting their efforts. They’re just distributing content from right-wing media and elsewhere,” Thiel said. “But it’s a place where you’d expect to see that kind of single person exhibiting signs that they’re going to potentially act out in something more radicalized.”
Truth Social’s online traffic surged to nearly 700,000 hits worldwide on Tuesday, the day after the FBI search, according to estimates by online analytics firm Similarweb. The site averaged about 300,000 hits a day last month. Twitter says it has about 37 million daily active users in the United States.
The disastrous launch of Trump’s Truth Social raises doubts about its long-term viability
Gina Ligon, head of the National Center for Counterterrorism Innovation, Technology and Education, a federally funded research center at the University of Nebraska at Omaha, said Shiffer’s calls for online violence showed similarities to the messages of previous attackers and offered a warning sign for the potential future. attacks
Shiffer’s “call to arms,” Ligon said, was reminiscent of similar online posts by a gunman in May who shot and killed 10 black people at a grocery store in Buffalo. He also compared Shiffer’s anti-government orientation to that of Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh, whose 1995 attack killed 168 people.
“The rhetoric that is so strong on the right now online should be taken very seriously by people because it mobilized [McVeigh] to an incredibly violent event,” he said.
Truth Social’s connection to the FBI raid has a similarity to Parler, another social media site once popular with Trump supporters that prides itself on free speech. Before Jan. 6, Trump supporters were sharing false theories about voter fraud and plans to descend on the Capitol to confront members of Congress voting to end the former president’s loss. Groups were organized on the platform, and then users documented themselves participating in the disturbance. Amazon Web Services, which ran the cloud computing system the site depended on, suspended it soon after.
Incidents of domestic terrorism have increased in recent years, fueled in part by the intensification of white supremacist propaganda.
Extremists have used social media to share inflammatory political rhetoric as planners of the January 6 violence spread misinformation about the election and plans to stop the election. During the coronavirus pandemic, government restrictions prompted attacks on public health officials and Democrats, including Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, the target of a kidnapping plot by members of the militia movement.
The recent altercations reflect a trend in the country’s psyche: one in 3…