You’d be amazed how many are in denial about this, including major social media platforms. From my view they’re doing basically nothing to stop it - and why would they? russian trolls = engagement = number go up. I dont think it’s just russian though. NK has fairly sophisticated technical capabilities.
AI has turbocharged this problem. One single person with a tiny bit of know how can run an effective troll campaign off thousands of accounts pretty effortlessly. It used to be sweatshop troll farms now it’s just one dude and a LLM. Even better for them, the LLM can speak less identifiable english in a way that they used to get exposed for in the past.
This problem of astroturfing/shilling/smurfing has spread across the entire web. Even hackernews, which is a very well moderated forum, has been infested by it, any mention of the problem publicly gets your account punished.
It’s hard to estimate how much traffic on a site like twitter is bot traffic but I’d wager it’s a shocking percentage, even a majority. Super difficult to prove though.
I’m not much of accelerationist but I’d rather the dems lose the house now for sure. Do you really think a slim majority is going to stop these people in any way? With Speaker Jefferies? He’s a dude that even we barely talk about and he will be the next Pelosi, a massive target/public enemy #1, and this time a black guy with an ethnic name. I bet even he doesn’t want to be speaker right now.
Oh shit wait, I forgot, its critical we hold the house right now so we can impeach trump some more.
I’ve posted before that the Dems make a lot more sense if you think of them as an organization the purpose of which is to raise money and distribute it to their attendant vampire corporations. Occasionally they try to win elections as a sort of side hustle. The Chair of the Democratic Party, Jaime Harrison, is a former corporate lobbyist who broke fundraising records in a race he lost to Lindsey Graham by 10 points. What does this tell you about the priorities of the party?
The real villain of the piece for me is Obama, who was the last time the Dems had a real functional brand, was swept into power on the back of the disaffected working class, and had total control of Congress. He could have made the Dems actually stand for something, instead he refused to take on any powerful interests and sold his supporters out. It was at this moment that the Dems embarked on this disastrous Suburban Strategy which, now that their racial coalition is disintegrating, leaves them without a coalition.
For the Democratic Party, rear-guard action as the political opposition will not be enough. The party must also take a hard look at why it lost the election. It took too long to recognize that President Biden was not capable of running for a second term. It took too long to recognize that large swaths of Democrats’ progressive agenda were alienating voters, including some of the most loyal supporters of their party.
Democrats need to make it mind-numbingly simple imo.
“If you make less than $100k, I will give you a $5k check every year.” Period, the end. Then do it.
No complication, no graduated income brackets, nothing else. Make it so people don’t have to do ANY follow up work to understand it. When people ask, say billionaires will pay for it. Just like Trump did with Mexico and the wall. Except Democrats can actually make billionaires pay for it. Simple.
And don’t make it some convoluted deduction on tax returns, or people will never give you credit. Make it a literal check in the mail. Then blast it all over social media and talk about it nonstop on the campaign trail.
Add a couple more simple messages like this – preferably ones that give people ponies – and then repeat ad nauseum.
This is one thing Bernie (and to some extent, Trump) does well. He stays on message, and his message is concise. Most of the time, he talks about just a few things. Healthcare good. Billionaires bad. That’s a message that works when people have the attention span of a fly.
I don’t think perfect messaging would’ve been enough to win this time. I still think this was mostly about the environment. But it does matter.
I agree 100%. Obama was a terrible president because he could have done a lot and ultimately did very little because he didn’t want to piss of people who wouldn’t piss on him if he was on fire.
I started reading Jonathan Haidt’s book recently, and I think there are some interesting corollaries to politics. His thesis, essentially, is that smartphones and social media ruined the mental health of kids, starting roughly around 2012 when smartphones became ubiquitous and when social media took off. IMO, there’s overwhelming evidence that he’s correct. And it’s a trend that happened all over the world.
Anyway, that timeframe is suspiciously similar to some of the global trends we’ve seen in politics. The rise of fascism, disinformation, incumbents getting voted out, etc. Seems pretty clear to me that smartphones didn’t just break the brains of kids. Adult brains turned to mush too.
I don’t know if I’m making an actionable point here, but I think it really can’t be understated just how important it is that people are getting their information from absolute horseshit sources online. Like, I saw a bunch of stuff this cycle deriding republicans for appealing to the “terminally online” but… aren’t we all terminally online these days?
Again, I don’t know if there’s an easy solution to this, but I think democrats can’t keep hoping that people will stop inhaling bullshit on tiktok and read longform Ezra Klein articles instead. They won’t. Democrats need to find ways to reach people in this reality.
