[ad_1]
My Pillow guy Mike Lindell claims that “bots and trolls” are behind a popular petition urging major retailers to cut ties with his company — and he’s hired private eyes to prove it.
In an interview with The Post, Lindell blasted as fake a Change.org petition that’s racked up about 105,000 signatures demanding Amazon, Walmart and Costco stop selling his My Pillow products over Lindell’s continued efforts to sow doubts over Joe Biden’s victory in the 2020 presidential election.
“This petition was put up by companies that are full of bots and trolls,” Lindell told The Post on Wednesday. “All they’ve done is attack retailers. These are hired groups to attack retailers.”
Asked what evidence he has for his claims, Lindell admitted he’s still trying to dig that up. He pointed instead to Facebook profiles with “zero friends” that have left negative comments on pages belonging to “retailers that were attacked before.”
“I’ve hired investigators out of my own pocket, huge companies to investigate who’s behind these because somebody ordered these attacks,” the embattled CEO said. “Change.org, they’re probably another attack group. We’re gonna find out who’s doing this to our country.”
Change.org, an online petition company with 400 million users, shot down Lindell’s claims, saying the MyPillow campaign was started by a real person and that all the signatures are authentic. The company also noted that other users have started petitions supporting Lindell.
“Our engineering team puts significant resources toward spam detection and prevention, from removing fake or inactive emails and verifying the authenticity of our users’ email addresses to monitoring petitions for suspicious signatures,” a Change.org rep told The Post in a statement. “If we are made aware of any fraudulent signatures, we remove them immediately — and in this case, we can confirm that the signatures on this petition are not fraudulent.”
“Bots and trolls” are a common bogeyman for Lindell. He’s previously blamed them for boycott threats against My Pillow and alleged in January that Dominion Voting Systems — which is suing him for $1.3 billion over his false accusations that the company stole votes — hired “bots and trolls and went after all my vendors.”
Lindell’s repeated claims that the 2020 election was stolen from ex-President Donald Trump has already resulted in some 22 retailers dropping My Pillow products, which he has estimated cost him about $65 million in sales.
The Change.org petition, launched by California man James Lanigan in mid-January, calls for the nation’s largest retailers to stop selling MyPillow products, including Bed Bath & Beyond, which has previously said it would phase out the products.
“Time to tell our major retailers to stop selling his products,” the petition reads. “We will not support funding insurrectionists!”
Lanigan didn’t return requests for comment. His Change.org profile describes him as “just a guy living in California that has progressive values and wants to save the environment.”
Lindell also told The Post that he’s preparing to bring his own lawsuit against Dominion next week accusing the voting-machine firm of quelling free speech with a slew of defamation complaints. But he said he did not know where the case would be filed.
“They suppressed free speech by suing — I don’t know how many now, it could be hundreds of lawsuits and threats to individuals and stations like Fox News,” Lindell said.
Dominion did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
[ad_2]
Source link
