- #Right wing media alternative reality falls apart Offline
- #Right wing media alternative reality falls apart tv
10ĭuring the 2016 campaign, most public concern about misinformation centered on shadowy foreign actors posing as news sources or US citizens.
Yet wild claims about election fraud spread virally anyway, ping-ponging from individual social media users to right-wing influencers and media. Facebook blocked new campaign ads for the week leading up to the election Twitter labeled hundreds of thousands of misleading tweets with fact-checking notes. Facebook, Twitter, and other platforms had made some changes in anticipation of a contested election, announcing plans to label or remove content delegitimizing election results, for instance. It was a particularly rude awakening for social media companies, which had long been reluctant to respond to the misinformation that flourished on their platforms, treating it as an issue of speech that could be divorced from real-world consequences.
#Right wing media alternative reality falls apart Offline
“There was a time in which we were like, ‘Oh, those are bots, those aren’t real people,’ or ‘That’s someone play-acting,’ or ‘We’re putting on our online persona and that doesn’t really reflect who we are in an offline sense.’ January 6 pretty much disabused us of that notion.” 9 “To see those caricatures come alive in this violent riot or insurrection, whatever you want to call it, was horrifying, but it was all very recognizable for me,” Starbird says. In the footage from the Capitol she saw the same symbols, outfits, and flags as those she’d been watching spread in far-right communities online. “If we can’t agree on a common truth, if we can’t find a starting place, then how does it end?” 8Īround the time of the 2016 election, Kate Starbird, a professor at the University of Washington who studies misinformation during crises, noticed that more and more social media users were incorporating markers of political identity into their online personas-hashtags and memes and other signifiers of their ideological alignment. “But when you can’t agree on what is true and not true, when my reality doesn’t match the reality of the person I’m speaking to, it makes it more difficult to find common ground,” she says. Community organizing is difficult in the best of times. But Bock’s fears about political misinformation are more sweeping. Voting rights is her organization’s “number one concern” at the moment. “When you can sell somebody the idea that their elections were stolen, they’ve been violated, right? So then you need protection,” Bock says, explaining the conservative justification for the suite of new restrictions in her state. In Arizona, Republicans have introduced nearly two dozen bills that would make it more difficult to vote, with the big lie about election fraud as a pretext. 3Ī prime example is the aggressive effort under way in a number of states to restrict access to the ballot. Within a few hours, right-wing communities online were discussing claims that scanners couldn’t read Sharpie-marked ballots. The conspiracy theory appeared to originate with a conservative radio host in Chicago, who tweeted early on Election Day about felt-tip pens bleeding through ballots.
Others waved Sharpie pens, in reference to a rumor that had spread wildly online in the preceding hours and quickly became known as “Sharpiegate.” Sharpiegate was based on an unfounded claim that the votes of Trump supporters who’d been given Sharpies to fill out their ballots would be disqualified. 2Īt the Maricopa County rally, some protesters carried long guns. A whole web of right-wing influencers and outlets amplified conspiracies about ballots stuffed in suitcases and counterfeit mail-in votes.
#Right wing media alternative reality falls apart tv
But Trump loyalists could easily confirm their belief that the election had been stolen from the president elsewhere, in more rabidly partisan outlets like Newsmax TV and One America News Network, which declared Fox a “Democrat Party hack” in the wake of its Arizona call. To Trump and his supporters, the network’s call in Arizona was a rare betrayal: In the previous four years Fox had become so enmeshed with the Trump administration that it functioned effectively as a mouthpiece for the White House.
0 kommentar(er)
