Board 8 > Politics Containment Topic 396: America's Mid(terms)

(+) Yeah! (+)

I think the chance for bernie ended in 2016. There were Trump/Bernie anti establishment voters that might have gone bernie.

By 2020 those people were all watching newsmax

I'm just posting so that there is something else to read on this page.

I spent a lot of time yesterday responding to misinformation about the Paul Pelosi attack on twitter last night.

Made a post compiling some of the most commonly repeated talking points.

Got kudos from and a retweeted by Hank Green:
https://twitter.com/hankgreen/status/1586486231659343872

Feel's good :)

nice

Good job. Correcting twitter misinformation sounds like hell but it has way more of a discernible effect than five people in this topic series trying in vain to turn Corrik into a normal person.

KamikazePotato posted...

Good job. Correcting twitter misinformation sounds like hell but it has way more of a discernible effect than five people in this topic series trying in vain to turn Corrik into a normal person.

Til you realize its been weaponized to hell and for all the little good you could do some bad group will throw some number of millions to run a troll farm.

KamikazePotato posted...

Good job. Correcting twitter misinformation sounds like hell but it has way more of a discernible effect than five people in this topic series trying in vain to turn Corrik into a normal person.

Oh, it was awful. Eventually I came up with a few copy/pastes I could use for some of the most common lies and started to use those liberally. The one that had the most success was the part about people saying "Paul called David a friend!". So I would copy paste:

The quote:
He (Paul) doesn't know who the male (David) is. But he (David) advised that his name is David and he (David) is a friend (of Nancy) and was waiting there for her.

If you don't clarify the pronouns it makes it sound like Paul called David his friend, but he didn't.

And maybe half the time they would respond to acknowledge that they were just reading the quote wrong.

Didn't have nearly as much success explaining to people that DePape was no longer a "left-wing activist" or that Paul and David weren't simply engaged in intercourse (which came up an awful lot).

It's not the sort of experience I want to go through on a daily basis as I do not think it would be good for mental health, but it still felt good to roll up my sleeves and put the work in for several hours and actually see some tangible results. The shoutout from Hank is just unbelievable icing on the cake.

Leafeon13N posted...

Til you realize its been weaponized to hell and for all the little good you could do some bad group will throw some number of millions to run a troll farm.

So? It's still better than doing nothing. Every little bit counts.

KamikazePotato posted...

So? It's still better than doing nothing. Every little bit counts.

It ends up pretty much in vain. You have about as much discernible impact as arguing in this topic.

red13n posted...

It ends up pretty much in vain. You have about as much discernible impact as arguing in this topic.

https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/a/user_image/0/9/7/AAXBdhAAD1JB.png
68k impressions is still something. I'm sure the vast majority of people seeing it are people who already agree that it was not a false flag attack. I'm sure getting the extra visibility from Hank did not change the mind of a lot of the people who would have been pushing that misinformation. But if nothing else it armed like-minded people with information they could use and give them more confidence to confront the misinformation being peddled.

I understand for every 1 me there could be tens of thousands of bots, but I can't change that either so why dwell on that aspect?

Nah. It has an effect. Not a gigantic effect, unless you have a big twitter following, but people on the sidelines do look at these things. Conservatives won't be convinced - flaky independents can. Saying otherwise is just doomerism to downplay someone here actually putting in effort.

108k impressions now <_<

Gonna go outside and touch grass (do yardwork) for a bit now though.

Nice job, fd.

Yeah that's super cool. You have more patience than I do haha, as evidence by my "well fuck them then" approach. If you convinced even one person, that's still more than most people can do.

FD you rule

I've also had some luck talking to people on YouTube before, but only ever if they seemed open to listening to left-wing arguments. Fighting conspiracy theorists who I'd assume were too far gone is something else. Props!

Peace___Frog posted...

Nice job, fd.

Suprak_the_Stud posted...

Yeah that's super cool. You have more patience than I do haha, as evidence by my "well fuck them then" approach. If you convinced even one person, that's still more than most people can do.

_Blur_ posted...

FD you rule

I've also had some luck talking to people on YouTube before, but only ever if they seemed open to listening to left-wing arguments. Fighting conspiracy theorists who I'd assume were too far gone is something else. Props!

Appreciate it! I put in a couple more hours tonight of copy pasting my responses to the never ending supply of misinformation. But now it's time for bed and the post Hank retweeted is up to 500k >_>

KamikazePotato posted...

Nah. It has an effect. Not a gigantic effect, unless you have a big twitter following, but people on the sidelines do look at these things. Conservatives won't be convinced - flaky independents can. Saying otherwise is just doomerism to downplay someone here actually putting in effort.

Oh I don't mean to disparage trying. If I had my way, there'd be a lot more people willing to fight through the bots. Hell you guys know I'm a fan of pointless arguing and twitters a prime place for shoving your opinion in peoples faces.

But to try to look at it on a macro level...Twitter is mostly just full of depression. Most of the spaces with even a little bit of reach are a cesspool of bots and paid trolls, and rarely ever on the side of anything remotely good. For every FD tweet that gets a ton of hits these days you just get more and more fake bot echo chambers.

Been at max twitter depression recently, have no real local election thingies of interest so been kind of passively looking at the reginoal adjacent race for LA mayor(I don't live in LA proper, so I don't get a vote, but I do work in LA). We basically have a Republican billionaire running as a democrat. Standard crime/homelessness fear porn all over the TV and such in a deep blue area. Needless to say, in a fairly deep blue area like LA, he shouldn't have much chance. But with the kind of money he can throw around...you click any local tweet about the election and you are inundated with paid trolls for a very localized election. to the average idiot they are all going to look real, just an instant fake echo chamber. The whole system and how its been basically weaponized for instant propaganda just kind of scares and depresses the hell out of me.

And its hard to blame the average person for not caring enough to counter them because you know most of the people on the other side are being paid to do it.

And now the owner of Twitter is also spreading the conspiracy theories. Great. Does he seriously have nothing better to do with his time?

speaking of tulsi, she literally let matt walsh interview her lol

what a terrible person

Peace___Frog posted...

Does he seriously have nothing better to do with his time?

Nope!

https://twitter.com/ggreenwald/status/1586711693631324160

Right wing journalist Glenn Greenwald getting in on the action, too.

Like I said, this is gonna be very fucking annoying.

https://twitter.com/ggreenwald/status/1586718554593923072?s=20&t=4s2pWeXeHsLV7USjvJ_SQg

lmao

His smoking hot Canadian girlfriend thanked him too, but you wouldn't know her because she goes to a different school.

I think it goes without saying, but the police need to do a press conference and clear this shit up. Not that it will eliminate the conspiracy shit, but it would help the most annoying nitpicks.

We should start acting like they do everytime something happens to them. Like next time they bring up steve scalise, just say it was a false flag so to bolster Steve Scalise's second amendment stance.

ChaosTonyV4 posted...

I think it goes without saying, but the police need to do a press conference and clear this shit up. Not that it will eliminate the conspiracy shit, but it would help the most annoying nitpicks.

The SFPD Chief DID a conference to clear some of it up:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tSKBEJSJqUs
(most of the relevant stuff is in the first 3 minutes)

Namely he clarified:
-There was only 1 hammer. An early description of events caused people to believe Paul and David each had a hand on separate hammers.

-When the door was opened Paul and David were in the entryway. It isn't specified but it stands to reason it was one of them who opened the door. They simply state "someone" opened the door, but I would imagine that would be one of the two people in the entryway. Y'know, next to the door. But this "someone" resulted in a Politico article describing it as "an unknown person opened the door" which has peopled convinced there was a 3rd person.

-That although the cops were responding to a "wellness" check it was a high priority check thanks to the intuition of the dispatcher to recognize something serious was occurring.

And yeah, we don't have the body cam footage yet or the original 911 audio, but that falls under typical "ongoing investigation" stuff for the moment. It's not often we have that stuff from the very first minute.

I've begun including the link to that video in my copy/paste to the "wHy DId tHeY BotH HaVe HAmmErS?!" posts.

If they did a press conference people would say its fake.

Like these are flat earther levels of conspiracy people here

Unfortunately after Elon tweeted that out, were talking about the entire Republican Party at this point.

Were fucked.

Yeah, again, I appreciate people like FD fighting the good fight. But Tony you are just as delusional as dems who think they can work with the good moderate republicans if you think a press conference is going to help assuage the doubts of conspiracy brains.

I didnt say that lol, I said itd help the most annoying nitpicks.

Specifically so when a conspiracy brain points out the police reported it as an unknown person opened the door, the non-conspiracy brained but distrustful of politician-brained dont go well thats a weird detail and BECOME conspiracy brained.

ChaosTonyV4 posted...

Unfortunately after Elon tweeted that out, were talking about the entire Republican Party at this point.

Were fucked.

literally first week on the job jesus for fucking christ sake

Almost like it's the kind of thing that will get advertisers to pull out!

ChaosTonyV4 posted...

Unfortunately after Elon tweeted that out, were talking about the entire Republican Party at this point.

Were fucked.

Eh, it's about a third of the country and I think demographics work in our favor.

It's a tough time, but if the far right can keep making the middle third who ignore politics life miserable we could get through it

Oh...well the pelosi conspiracy was kind of fringey and now its not. Great.

Elon speedrunning the "regret your most recent billion + dollar purchase" challenge

Brazil bout to be couped

Sike, even with some public transportation fuckery, presumably to depress turnout, Bolsonaro has lost re-election.

Now he can move on to his favorite hobby, catching Covid, full time.

ChaosTonyV4 posted...

Brazil bout to be couped

De Silva won

Edit: I didn't refresh first

Well, I mean, he's shown signs he might try to stay in power regardless so I don't know if Brazil is totally in the clear of a coup yet until he has officially left office. Hope they are though.

I don't follow Brazilian politics close, but I thought Bolsonaro was horrifyingly the favorite?

No, in fact IIRC polling consistently showed him losing (though in the first round he outperformed the polling because I guess far right fascists just do that everywhere now) but he just went full Trump in terms of calling it fake, saying anything less than a big win for him would be fraud, and then there was a shit ton of terrifying voter suppression going on at the hands of the police which is what Tony was alluding to earlier.

ChaosTonyV4 posted...

Sike, even with some public transportation fuckery, presumably to depress turnout, Bolsonaro has lost re-election.

Now he can move on to his favorite hobby, catching Covid, full time.

Good riddance

I really wish voters could just understand that voting for (far-right, but also not-so-far-fight) conservative policies is usually severely damaging economically, and will fuck your country up, and/or will fuck your state up. It's frustrating seeing a trend of conservative voters based on fears of what liberals (I'm using "liberal" as a catch-all, progressives, don't worry) will do, despite their policies being mundane at worst. Meanwhile, liberal voters don't vote based on the pure fear of how badly the conservatives can fuck things up.

Who the fuck would pay 20 bucks a month for this?

https://twitter.com/reckless/status/1586884530988027904?s=21

https://twitter.com/mdzapp/status/1586887866180947969?s=46&t=dC_hlq4vMxYjadm7MYMKRg

Elon Musk is so out of touch he thinks people will pay $20/month for... a checkmark.

I like how he thinks the point of twitter verification is having a cool, important badge of honor, and not, you know, verifying that it's the real person they say they are when it's a person of interest

Yeah, looking forward to impersonators paying the $20 that actual people won't and usurping their online identity!

My guess is that hell allow more free speech if you pay for the checkmark

Paratroopa1 posted...

I like how he thinks the point of twitter verification is having a cool, important badge of honor, and not, you know, verifying that it's the real person they say they are when it's a person of interest

tbh the real goal of it is to intentionally hamper verification because he thinks current Twitter is too biased against misinformation sources

hence y'know, the sources he tweeted earlier today that are known for claiming Hillary Clinton died in 2016

Twitter was a mistake.

Hell all of social media pretty much is.