What Is Verrit? Hillary Clinton Tweets About Supporting A New Media Platform

A newly-launched media platform elicited attention — wanted and unwanted — after former presidential candidate Hillary Clinton tweeted Sunday that she had signed up for it.

Hours after this endorsement, the website Verrit confirmed in a tweet that they were subjected to a "massive denial of service attack."

Website founder Peter Daou tweeted expressing his excitement on receiving Clinton's support, however, he also tweeted later that Verrit was under distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack which appeared to be an "organized effort to take us down after Hillary Clinton's endorsement."

Daou has been associated with Clinton since several years. In 2006, he was hired by the Clinton campaign to help disseminate her message online as he was one of the most prominent political bloggers in the U.S., the New York Times reported. He was also named the Internet Director for Clinton's 2008 presidential run, according to Daou's website.

According to Donorbox, an online portal and mobile app for making donations, "Verrit collects and contextualizes noteworthy facts, stats, and quotes for politically engaged citizens. We center the shared interests, values, and aspirations of 65.8 million Clinton voters."

Daou said that Verrit was his attempt to create an online hub for Clinton supporters where they can find easy-to-share facts, statistics, and other "information you can take out to social media when you’re having debates on key issues people are discussing," Recode reported.

The "65.8 million" referred to in Clinton's tweet implies to her own total vote from the 2016 presidential election, according to the technology news website.

The founder did not disclose whether he contacted Clinton for her public support of Verrit, Recode reported. According to the report, Onward Together, Clinton's political action organization dedicated to supporting progressive causes, did not respond to emails for comments about the former secretary of state's support for the website. Onward Together is known for financially supporting a number of organizations that are fighting against President Donald Trump.

Daou clarfied to Recode that traffic driven by Clinton's endorsement was not responsible for the cyber attack on the website. Clinton's tweet generated more than 10,000 new Twitter followers for the website.

However, Clinton's Verrit tweet did create lots of curiosity about the website among the social media users, with many criticizing her for it.

In an interview May 31 at Code Conference, addressing how social media platforms might have affected her chances during the last year's campaign, she urged the platforms to come up with a solution to slow "the weaponization and manipulation" of information, adding that she knew it was a challenging task, the Verge reported.

“I have a lot of sympathy at this point… for people trying to make these decisions,” she said adding: “I would just urge them to hurry up.”

Talking about the hacking of emails and fake news during the campaign last year, Clinton cited the hacking of her campaign chairman John Podesta's email account. She said it was “anodyne” but the hacking had led to conspiracy theories. Clinton also targeted websites such as Infowars that manufactured the “most outrageous, outlandish, absurd lies you can imagine."