On Sunday night, President Donald Trump retweeted a video of a violent incident on a New York City subway platform. The video shows a Black man pushing a white woman into a train car and is captioned “Black Lives Matter / Antifa.” The problem? It is over a year old and has nothing to do with either Black Lives Matter or Antifa. It, in fact, shows the actions of a mentally ill man with no known ties to either group.
Trump’s Sunday night retweet is a case study in how far-right online networks work across social media platforms to build their followings, promote their messages, and provide Trump with the viral content that filled his timeline on Sunday. The video was first posted online by a self-identified follower of a network of online white supremacists. It was then re-posted with the inaccurate caption by a recently created Spanish-language citizen news site, TDN_NOTICIAS, dedicated to spreading inflammatory, racist news items. From TDN_NOTICIAS, it was a short journey to Trump’s Twitter feed, where he retweeted it. By working off a variety of platforms—Twitter, Dropbox, and Telegram among them—a group of hateful online provocateurs managed to successfully spread a false news report and gain a coveted signal boost from Trump’s Twitter account.
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Source: How hate and misinformation go viral: A case study of a Trump retweet