Let’s talk about social media, propaganda, and the coming campaign. I’m going to say some things and hopefully a productive discussion will ensue. 1/

Some things we know from 2016 and revelations since then.
1. Big traditional media (BTM) gets a lot of reporting cues from social media and internet chatter.
2. Political reporters tend to be very shallow on fact and analysis and attracted to hype. 2/

3. BTM are kings of “both sides” when it comes to debate even when the facts are on one side (“but Republican z says this about climate change!”)
4. BTM are kings of Murc’s Law -
"only Democrats have agency, and therefore everything is there fault."

3/

5. BTM reports Republican messaging verbatim then reports what they think is wrong with Democratic messaging.
6. There are propaganda troll farms. They exist. This is a fact.
7. Trump’s campaign is very social media oriented. 4/

8. People who ally with Trump are very social media oriented and use troll farms extensively.
9. The right wing has a tight messaging machine:
9a. Fox News will talk about something in a slightly less crazy conspiratorial way. 5/

9b. Simultaneously, thousands of blogs and right wing “news sites” will talk about the same thing in a more unhinged way, including inserting actual disinformation.
6/

9c. Simultaneously Facebook and twitter will be full of memes and literally 10s of thousands of trolls pushing the same message, more or less crazy based on target - the ones going for QAnon will be outright loopy, the ones going for swing voters will be more organized 7/

10. They are VERY good at demo targeting. See Cambridge Analytics.
11. They will have “left” propaganda trolls, “right” propaganda trolls, “Black” propaganda trolls, etc. They already do.

8/

Note: I don’t think Bernie pays for his propaganda trolls. I think they come from pro-Trump funders or general chaos agents. So they aren’t going away.
9/

What will the trolls be pushing?
I think this is more predictable now than it was with Clinton (they really went after “corrupt” with the emails and the foundation. That was the main theme).
10/

I don’t pretend to be a soothsayer but we have some ideas. The RW trolls will be pushing some corruption with the Ukraine thing, but I don’t really seeing that having legs like the emails did. 11/

But a lot of trolling is just pushing imagery and *feelings* into your subconscious. So lots of images and videos of Biden touching people are going to be passed around frantically. Tara Reade will be raised constantly. 12/

The left trolls will do the things we’ve already seen - harp on things in Biden’s past that are not great left actions, harp on M4A and wanting poor people to die.
That’s as far as I go with prognostication. I’m not good at prognostication. 13/

But the discussion I hope to foster is, given the knowledge we have, what can we do to reduce the negative impact? How can we arm ourselves, knowing that there is L and R media who will happily amplify any anti-Biden messaging, knowing that BTM gets cues from social media 14/

And knowing the relentless repetition of imagery and simple messages impacts people’s *feelings* about a person and opens their minds to biased thinking about them?
Floor’s open.