Former undercover CIA agent Valerie Plame Wilson is looking to crowdfund enough money to buy Twitter so that US President Donald Trump can't use it.
Wilson launched the fundraiser last week, tweeting:
The GoFundMe page for the fundraiser says Trump's tweets “damage the country and put people in harm's way”.
As of Wednesday morning, she had raised less than 6,000 dollars of her 1 billion dollar goal. By Friday morning, the amount had risen up to a little less than 60,000 dollars.
In an emailed statement earlier, White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders said the low total showed that the American people like the Republican President's use of Twitter.
Her ridiculous attempt to shut down his first amendment is the only clear violation and expression of hate and intolerance in this equation.
Meanwhile, Trump continued with his usual social media antics, retweeting a picture where he is shown “eclipsing” his predecessor Barack Obama.
Wilson wrote on the fundraiser's GoFundMe page that she hopes to raise enough money to buy a controlling interest of Twitter stock.
If she doesn't have enough to purchase a majority of shares, she said, she will explore options to buy "a significant stake" and champion the proposal at Twitter's annual shareholder meeting.
If Plame were to hit her 1 billion dollar goal, she’d still fall far short of gaining a controlling interest in the company. As of Wednesday, a majority stake would cost roughly 6 billion dollars.
But a 1 billion dollar stake would make her Twitter's largest shareholder and give her a very strong position to exert influence on the company.
Twitter declined to comment on Wednesday on Wilson's tweet about seeking to buy the San Francisco-based company.
Wilson's identity as a CIA operative was leaked by an official in President George W Bush's administration in 2003 in an effort to discredit her husband, Joe Wilson, a former diplomat who criticised Bush's decision to invade Iraq. She left the agency in 2005.
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