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| So many ways Trump and the GOP are using social media to create an authoritarian/oligarchial regime for the United States |
He created a Facebook page, not for himself, but for an alter ego. He picked a forgettable name, and posted a profile photo that obscured his face. He clicked "Like" on the official pages of Donald Trump and his re-election campaign.
Almost immediately the Facebook algorithms prompted him to follow Ann Coulter, Fox and fan pages with titles like "In Trump We Trust." He dutifully followed these groups.
Coppins also wrote, "I also gave my cellphone number to the Trump campaign, and joined a handful of private Facebook groups for MAGA diehards, one of which required an application that seemed designed to screen out interlopers."
The Facebook feed that Coppins' alter ego established created a new reality of sorts. Coppins watched live, on TV, the impeachment hearings, but on the Facebook page, edited video made the same televised testimony look like an exoneration of Trump.
Pro-Trump propaganda filled the Facebook feed, "Democrats are doing Putin's bidding," "The only message these radical socialists and extremists will understand is a crushing." and so on.
The resulting Atlantic article by Coppins had this startling paragraph:
"I was surprised by the effect it had on me. I'd assumed that my skepticism and media literacy would inoculate me against such distortions. But I soon found myself reflexively questioning every headline. I wasn't that I believed Trump and his boosters were telling the truth. It was that, in this state of heightened suspicion, truth itself - about Ukraine, impeachment, or anything else - felt more and more difficult to locate. With each swipe, the notion of observable reality drifted further out of reach."
If a seasoned, savvy journalist like Coppins felt disoriented, imagine how everybody else feels against this social media onslaught. His article opens a window on how easy social media, especially bad actors like Facebook, can much more easily allow us to slide into authoritarianism. Ifyou think it can't happen here, think again.
To an extent, it's already happened, and the apparatus is set up to take us down the road to this evil transition.
Coppins' Atlantic article, "The Billion Dollar Disinformation Campaign To Re-Elect The President," is a long read, but something you should read, scary as it is.
This Facebook full-court press by the Trumpsters is a way of using a megaphone to drown out real truth, or as Coppins puts it, "jamming the signals, sowing confusion." Coppins said scholars call all this "censorship through noise."
Pretty much all political campaigns have their share of spin, half-truths, dog whistles and such.
Trump and his campaign take this to a whole, extremely scary new level.
A important part of this strategy is to first discredit the news media, you know, all the good, but imperfect journalists of the world who actually try to expose the truth, the real truth about everything. Trump operatives have gone through the social media accounts belonging to hundreds of political journalists, compiling all their posts into dossiers.
Definitely sounds Putinesque, doesn't it?
When a particular news story the Trumps don't like is written by a particular journalist, they and their surrogates flood Facebook and other places with any past social media post the journalist wrote that could be spun as problematic or worse.
This isn't to combat a supposed or real liberal slant in the news media. This effort is to destroy mainstream media altogether.
We're not just talking about the tedious talking heads and columnists at national outfits like the New York Times, CNN, MSNBC and others.
They're after your local newscaster and newspaper. Coppins writes that the Trump campaign will train a "swarm of surrogates to undermine local TV stations and newspapers. Polls have long fouond that Americans across the political spectrum trust local news more than the national media. If the campaign has its way, that trust will be eroded by November."
Meanwhile, these operatives are creating innocuous looking "news" sites like the Arizona Monitor or The Kalamazoo Times that look like traditional local publications, right down to community notices and school news and events schedules. Only very knowledgeable people, taking a close look at these "newspapers" will find no bylines and no addresses for local offices. And these "newspapers" will have plenty of sophisticated propaganda that sort of looks like news.
The Coppins article goes on about these details, and again, you really should read every word.
For Trump and his fascists minions, it's all about destroying all the the institutions that have held our democracy together for more than two centuries. They really do want to get rid of all the ideals about what makes America America.
That's why Trump is also seemingly pardoning every crooked person he can find, while at the same time punishing good citiziens and patriots.
He and his Republican toadies want to destroy the fact the United States, for all its faults, has been a beacon of freedom for the world.
This is particularly dangerous now as we seem to be at the begining of the Corornavirus pandemic. It's not officially a pandemic, but it's getting worse by the minute. The whole world needs accurate and timely information to stay healthy, weather the economic crisis this will could bring on, and squash out rumors that could lead to civil unrest.
A lot of the citizenry of this nation seem like they think Trump and the Republicans are boffo for doing lying and trying to establish some sort of weird oligarchy. They want to punish "the right people," i.e. anyone who is nonwhite and even remotely liberal.
Sounds great to them. Just wait until this new autocracy turns their powerand anger on them, for whatever reason.
