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How to cause division and distract from an argument: A step by step guide (THREAD)
1) An idiot makes a mistake- UKTV take an episode of Fawlty Towers down as a knee jerk reaction rather than actually thinking. Colonial past, slavery, racism in policing- not Basil Fawlty
1) An idiot makes a mistake- UKTV take an episode of Fawlty Towers down as a knee jerk reaction rather than actually thinking. Colonial past, slavery, racism in policing- not Basil Fawlty
2) A suspicious account reacts. 0 followers, joined in Sep 2019, nonhuman profile pic- these should be red flags for a bot or a troll.
3) The straw man is made. A tweet comes from the account that could be described as how some people think the left might react to the story. It reinforces prejudices that people have over what they perceive as ‘woke’. Bonus points for using ‘Britishness’ and ‘WW2’ as triggers.
4) The trap is set. The tweet gets attention, a few retweets. Most are quote tweets with outraged reactions which do two things- they allow people to say ‘look at what THEY all think’ and it removes the casual viewer from the original account by one click. It ends here, unless...
5) A big fish bites. With the retweeting the message spreads until someone with a bigger audience sees it. Social media allows an immediate response, without a moment to question the original source.
6) A bigger game. Hundreds of thousands of people now see the reaction to the original tweet in their feed. They react to the quote tweet and are left with the impression that this is an opinion held by a large group of THEM, not a 0 follower account.
7) The Fallout. Potentially thousands of people have now been exposed. The argument has been changed from confronting the legacy of colonialism/slavery and racism in policing and is now about a TV show and how ‘lefty snowflakes are humourless thought police’
8) PLEASE CHECK YOUR SOURCES BEFORE REPLYING!
The danger here is a drip feeding of this kind of nonsense until people are left with a general (incorrect)sense of the ideas of THEM (both left and right) rather than actually engaging in constructive dialogue
The danger here is a drip feeding of this kind of nonsense until people are left with a general (incorrect)sense of the ideas of THEM (both left and right) rather than actually engaging in constructive dialogue
And this is all screaming into the void because I don’t have 200,000 followers so it’s unlikely to reach the people affected by this particular example and so they’ll be talking about a sitcom and not how Black Lives Matter.
