Been playing with this idea of something I'm calling trope-field fit, basically this idea of how when you pair a trope (death suspiciously close to vaccination) with a field (a set of existing media or a predictable stream of events) you get a conspiracy production engine. https://twitter.com/annamerlan/status/1380589263213916161

Basically you don't need infinite inventiveness once you lock into that trope-field fit, you just scan the field (in this case new celebrity deaths) and apply the pattern.

But you do need the fit! When the Podesta emails came out the idea was scan it for corruption, secret dealings, etc. But that didn't work out (mostly) and wasn't very participatory. On the other hand the trope-field fit of coded satanic cultspeak to the emails was good.

A field can also be a body of public media. So you have hundreds of moon landing photos. And they form a good field for the trope that the moon landing happened on a sound stage.

Once you work out that fit, you just go through the photos and say how can I use this for this trope. And if the fit is good the game is pretty easy. If the fit is bad the game is hard.

So with the moon landing you get the trope (soundstage fakery, Potemkin event) and then you're able to see things like "This 'C' on the rock must be a prop label"

A field might be the Secretary of State or county reports of votes, and a trope might be "the two a.m. dump" or "more votes than voters" or "vote-flipping software".

The tropes are good because they're engaging, but they are also good because they are tied to a well suited body of data or stream of events that can be used to turn tropes into a stream of claims or framed events.

One of the best trope-field fits of 2020 was mail-dumping. As soon as the trope "Mail carriers working to throw out republican votes" was tied to a field (any mail dumping event of now or the past 15 years that could be framed as current) it was like an *engine*.

What's interesting to me is that sometimes these pairings are ancient (vaccine dissent and framing a stream of adverse events, secret earpiece at the debate). But there is a point they get invented too.

Secret earpiece at the debate was popularized by Rush Limbaugh in 2000 against Gore. But it really took off with the Bush Bulge of 2004, with a whole lot of liberals circling various parts of debate photos like they were Moon Rock C.

It really works for the same reason as the moon landing -- you've got this field of photos and video and you just scan it, for Bush it's a bulge, for Hillary Clinton an "ear pearl" etc. But the fit is good, the field is extensive, you'll find something.

In any case, whenever you find someone doing something *lazily* as @annamerlan does above it's always interesting because sometimes it gives you insight into the underlying routine.

As far as the significance of all of this I think there's maybe two things. The first is we tend to think people choose the most engaging tropes. But for participatory propaganda (see @lageneralista etc) the available field may influence the attractiveness of a trope.

So many of the things that took off in election 2020, from sharpiegate to mail dumping to Dominion Voting were tied to specific fields that allowed multiple people to play -- e.g. here's where to look, here's what to look for, here's the trope to frame it.

It wasn't just that the tropes were engaging or good for the narrative, it was they were well suited for a set of events, media, or data that could be framed, daily.

So prediction of likely disinformation/misinformation needs to consider not only narrative but the likely streams of events, data, and media that will get reframed and what tropes are going to work best with those things. Strong trope and lots of stuff to frame = likely epicenter

But the second thing to note is while tropes+fields produce endless framed events, at the trope+field level these are actually fairly old and well known games, and looking at misinfo at that level (rather than too-abstract narratives and too-granular claims) might be productive.