(Stolen from Foldspace! (Thanks!))
” ... it sounds like a paranoid fever dream–a well-funded cabal of powerful people, ranging across industries and ideologies, working together behind the scenes to influence perceptions, change rules and laws, steer media coverage and control the flow of information.”
At some point, conspiracy theories became conspiracy observation.
The most important takeaway from Quinn’s research, however, was that engaging with toxic content only made it worse. “When you get attacked, the instinct is to push back, call it out, say, ‘This isn’t true,'” Quinn says. “But the more engagement something gets, the more the platforms boost it. The algorithm reads that as, ‘Oh, this is popular; people want more of it.'” The solution, she concluded, was to pressure platforms to enforce their rules, both by removing content or accounts that spread disinformation [as defined by the Left] and by more aggressively policing it in the first place... In November 2019, Mark Zuckerberg invited nine civil rights leaders to dinner at his home, where they warned him about the danger of the election-related falsehoods that were already spreading unchecked...
Throughout election season, members of Podhorzer’s group minimized incidents of voter intimidation..They didn’t want to amplify false claims by engaging them,...Podhorzer, meanwhile, was warning everyone he knew that polls were underestimating Trump’s support.
The racial-justice uprising sparked by George Floyd’s killing in May was not primarily a political movement. The organizers who helped lead it wanted to harness its momentum for the election...
Activists began preparing to reprise the demonstrations if Trump tried to steal the election. “Americans plan widespread protests if Trump interferes with election,” Reuters reported in October, one of many such stories...
More excerpts of an almost 7,000 word article:
About a week before Election Day, Podhorzer received an unexpected message: the U.S. Chamber of Commerce wanted to talk...Neil Bradley, the Chamber’s executive vice president and chief policy officer....wanted to send a broader, more bipartisan message. He reached out to Podhorzer, through an intermediary both men declined to name....
Trump addressed the crowd that afternoon, peddling the lie that lawmakers or Vice President Mike Pence could reject states’ electoral votes. He told them to go to the Capitol and “fight like hell.” Then he returned to the White House as they sacked the building. As lawmakers fled for their lives and his own supporters were shot and trampled, Trump praised the rioters as “very special.” It was his final attack on democracy, and once again, it failed. By standing down, the democracy campaigners outfoxed their foes. “We won by the skin of our teeth, honestly, and that’s an important point for folks to sit with,” says the Democracy Defense Coalition’s Peoples.
(Stolen from Foldspace! (Thanks!))