Writing for The Atlantic yesterday, Renée DiResta noted that Twitter’s flood of conspiracy theories now define reality for the far right. These crazy, baseless “stories seem absurd to most people. But to a growing number of Americans living in bespoke realities, wild rumors on Twitter carry weight. Political influencers, elites, and prominent politicians on the right are embracing even pathologically outlandish claims made by their base. They know that amplifying online rumors carries little cost— and offers considerable political gain.” Musk turned Twitter into a safe haven for right-wing conspiracy theories, regardless of how dangerous they are to the public. His companies should be nationalized and he should be deported back to Africa. He’s a danger to the country.
“The amplification of emotionally manipulative chatter is a familiar issue on social media” wrote DiResta. “What’s more disconcerting is that Republican political elites— with Musk now among them—are openly legitimizing what the Twitter rumor mill churns out when it serves their objectives. Twitter’s owner has claimed that FEMA is ‘actively blocking citizens’ who are trying to help flood victims in North Carolina, and that it ‘used up its budget ferrying illegals into the country instead of saving American lives.’ J. D. Vance, the Republican vice-presidential candidate, elevated rumors of pet-eating Haitians to national attention on social media for days; Donald Trump did the same in a presidential debate. Influential public figures and political elites— people who, especially in times of crisis, should be acting as voices of reason— are using baseless, often paranoid allegations for partisan advantage.”
History shows that the weaponization of rumors can lead to devastating consequences— scapegoating individuals, inciting violence, deepening societal divisions, sparking moral panics, and even justifying atrocities. Yet online rumormongering has immense value to right-wing propagandists. In the 2020 election, Trump and his political allies set the narrative frame from the top: Massive fraud was occurring, Trump claimed, and the election would be stolen from him. The supposed proof came later, in the form of countless online rumors. I and other researchers who watched election-related narratives unfold observed the same pattern again and again: Trump’s true believers offered up evidence to support what they’d been told was true. They’d heard that impersonators were using other people’s maiden names to vote. A friend of a friend’s ballot wasn’t read because they’d used a Sharpie marker. These unfounded claims were amplified by influencers and went viral, even as Twitter tried to moderate them— primarily by labeling and sometimes downranking them. None of them turned out to be true. Even so, today, 30 percent of the public and 70 percent of Republicans still believe the Big Lie that Democrats stole the 2020 election from Trump. This simmering sense of injustice is powerful— it spurred violence on January 6, 2021— and continues to foster unrest.
…Conservatives have reframed fact-checking as a censorship technique by “woke” tech companies and biased journalists. Musk abandoned the practice in favor of Community Notes— which, in theory, allow fellow users to add their own fact-checks and context to any post on the platform. Musk once described Community Notes as a “game changer for combating wrong information”— he understood, correctly, that opening up the fact-checking process to many different voices could better enable consensus about what the truth is. But Community Notes cannot keep up with the rumors roiling Twitter. Notes are absent from some of the most outrageous claims about pet-eating migrants or FEMA malfeasance, which have millions of views. Even as Musk himself has become one of the most prominent boosters of political rumors, Community Notes on Musk’s own tweets have a way of disappearing.
David Kurtz wrote that “The country is poised at a great fork in the road, with a historically significant decision to be made between democracy or authoritarianism, pluralism or cultism, the rule of law or Trumpian retribution. Yet the national political conversation, the news coverage of it, the pace of daily events doesn’t seem to be rising to the momentousness of the occasion… [It’s] like we’re all waiting out the clock until Election Day, resigned that a sufficient number of our fellow citizens may in fact decide to ditch the American experiment as we know it, imperfect though it’s been, in favor of some kind of gaudy neofascist kleptocracy.”
Kurtz seems worried “we seem to be slouching toward a potential second coming of Trump. I don’t have an especially satisfying global answer, but there are some dynamics that contribute to this unpleasant sensation that we’re walking eyes wide open into the abyss. It is a mark of the poor health of our democracy that democracy itself is on the ballot at all. A choice between democracy or not democracy isn’t a choice but an existential threat that doesn’t sustain or nourish civic life. The social compact has already been broken when we can’t agree that free and fair elections are a universal goal or that we abide by the results of those elections or that the rule of law should apply equally to everyone. We can’t even agree on whether an auto-coup by a sitting president is a good or a bad thing— or a thing at all. To put a finer point on it: While we should hail the self-sacrifice of Republican Never Trumpers for forgoing their own political ambitions in service of defeating Trump and upholding the rule of law, something is fundamentally broken when it requires a coalition that ranges from AOC to Liz Cheney to elect a pro-democracy candidate. Democracy is designed to mediate the differences among those who believe in democracy, not resolve the conflict over whether to have democracy at all... The current moment is so strange and attenuated in part because the robust public debate we’re accustomed to is shorn of any real meaning when one party to that debate doesn’t give a fuck about debating. You can’t debate democracy with people who don’t believe in democracy, or debating, or empirical evidence, or anything approximating truth or reality.”
So… are young people going to save us from ourselves? Polling from John Della Volpe is optimistic on the question. Dave Weigel interviewed him recently and he said he thinks “that many folks underestimated the degree to which younger people were looking for political leaders they could connect with. There’s not a lot of daylight in the policy between Harris and Biden [huh?], but there’s just a tremendous amount of confidence in Vice President Harris that you can feel from this data. There’s a genuine enthusiasm for voting among Democrats now. And I’ve said, for a decade, that for a Democrat to have a strong chance of winning the Electoral College, you need to be at 60% plus with younger people. It’s going to make the pathway much, much easier. And she’s in the ballpark. She needs to stay there and build.”
Weigel asked “how does Harris’ position now compare to the Democrats who’ve won and lost? And Della Volpe responded “It best compares to Obama 2012 and Biden 2020. Obama won 66% of the under-30 vote in 2008. He won 60% in 2012, and Biden got 60% in 2020. The feel of this campaign is a mash-up of 2008 and 2018. It’s the hopefulness and the energy of Obama’s first run, and it’s the focus, organization and determination of 2018 when young people got serious. People got organized after Parkland. That’s the year Joe Crowley lost his primary to AOC, for example. One difference is that Trump is doing somewhat better with men than he did four years ago. He’s been introducing himself to a new group of voters for the first time. That is paying off to some degree. Today’s 20 year olds were 11 when he came down the escalator. They were 12 or 13 when he appointed Steve Bannon to the NSC, when he pulled out of the Paris accords, when he tried to end the ACA. These kids didn’t see him as a villain. They saw him as an anti-hero. They saw him standing up to authority. They tell me they thought it was funny. Then they enter high school with COVID. They’re discovering Joe Rogan, Theo Von, and conspiracy theories about the government. The only sport they could watch for an extended period of time was UFC and Dana White. And when Biden becomes president, post-COVID, the cost of living spikes and it’s really expensive to do the simple things young people want to do. Many young people connect the feelings of being five years old during the Great Recession and worried about whether their parents would stay in their house to fear of inflation and potential recession today; that’s where a Trump-curious young voter is coming from.”
god will save us. if there were a god. otherwise, there's nobody. we made sure of that.